AMBR Cards: ideas to help track D&D moves
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I’m posting a couple articles about tools to use in D&D games (see previous one on tracking conditions with stackable rings here), and, today, I wanted to talk about AMBR Cards!
The creator, Jonathan, made this card deck to help with his daughter’s D&D game after seeing how the kids were struggling to keep up with all the tracking required.
I know from games with both my own kiddo and the tween group that I GM, trying to manage spells, conditions, turn order, etc can be a lot for any player (seasoned or new), leading to some mishaps where a player maybe forgets about their bonus action until it’s too late. As a GM, when there’s six tweens at the table and questions flying about, I also have a hard time processing everything, and I don’t always remember to ask if they’ll be utilizing unused movement or triggering a reaction.
It can be REALLY disappointing, especially for young players, when they miss an opportunity and then can see how it might have made a difference after the fact!
These cards were designed to help with that!
Each player gets one card for each of the four main moves (Action, Movement, Bonus action, and Reaction) that a character can take in a D&D game.
As they use each one, they flip it over to show that it’s been used.
It is pretty simple, which is GOOD, because it allows the player to track their four move types, including reactions that hang on after the main turn is complete without needing to follow more rules. It also gives the GM visibility to track as well since everything is laid out on the table, alleviating a bit of GM-load too.
Each deck comes with enough cards for 6 players plus the GM, so you’ll usually have enough for the whole table with one card deck… unless you stretch it a bit with some suggestions below and maybe need two.
When we were checking it out, we found a few other uses for these cards that also helped with tracking when a character (or GM controlled creature) had extra actions or movement.
For example, if a character gets multiple attacks per turn, you can give the player an extra action card (to represent the additional attack) and call the card an attack card. This method of adding extra cards can also be applied for conditions, like Haste (adding action and movement cards) or incapacitated (remove action and reaction cards).
This gives a VERY clear visual of what all of the new or reduced options are, which is particularly important if they change throughout the game (i.e. temporary conditions that can be hard to remember).
We did also think of some ways that we might want to add more, particularly when it comes to legendary creatures. Having LR (legendary resistance) and LA (legendary action) cards could be helpful to use as counters for the table to track in larger combat encounters, but I also see how those fall a bit under the GM tools, and the scope of this particular deck is on player tracking.
All in all, I thought these were a useful tool! It’s something that feels really intuitive and like something that could be a fun DIY… the deck of nice printed and coated cards is $5.20 (at the time of this post). The creator is selling them print-on-demand at cost to help folks be able to use them for school and library groups, which I think is pretty awesome.
I can also appreciate how he took an idea that I think a lot of people would have left on the table because they’d assume it was already done before, and then turned around to do a great job making a quality set of cards that really do help.
I hope this gives you some ideas for ways to improve your D&D table for kids, and find the AMBR Deck by AAW Games here!
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