When it comes to D&D 4E initiative cards are a great idea but these are too cluttered to be very useful. Most of this is information that most DMs will never need to know. With so much on each card it becomes a chore finding the information you need. It is faster to ask your players for the info which defeats the purpose of having it in the first place.

The other drawback to this product is the cards are only for PCs but none for monsters. It is only half a product.

I was looking for a card to keep track of initiative and some of the more major stats for the campaign that I'm running. Wizards of the Coast had one in their RPA Section (The Game Mechanics: Initiative Card), but it wasn't 4.0. After a quick search, I found this free PDF and couldn't be happier. Not only did I find initiative cards, I found what amounts to mini-character sheets! My wife saw them and now she wants one to use during the game!

A great product!

It's awfully hard to argue with "free," and I really like quite a few of LPJ Design's products, but I just don't see myself using these cards. In summary, the cards are too big, try to incorporate too many details, and don't match my own needs and expectations very well.

For more details, read on.

These initiative cards try to do too much in too small a space. As another reviewer wrote, these quarter-sheets are not so much cards as miniature character sheets. But as miniature character sheets, they won't serve you well for very long. With only three lines for each category of power (at-will, encounter, daily, and utility), you'll run out of space on the card by the time you reach the paragon tier. There's no room for feats or class abilities, so the information is seriously incomplete if the cards are trying to be miniature character sheets.

Thing is, being a miniature character sheet isn't a good goal for an initiative card. Personally, I favor a minimalist approach to DM bookkeeping, and this product takes a different tack. In the middle of combat, I as a DM don't need to see all the numbers for the characters' ability scores, a list of their powers, their attack strings, and so on. All I really need is a name and an initiative number, and maybe some of the information included in the left-hand column on the LPJ initiative cards (current hp, use of second wind, and most especially, conditions and passive insight/perception)--but in my own games, I use plastic/acrylic tokens to represent conditions, death saves, magic item uses, and so on, and I let the PCs handle the rest of their own bookkeeping.

I should "come clean" and state that I game with a laptop and have an initiative tracking tool that serves me just fine. I have tried to write this review from the perspective of a DM actually seeking to use initiative cards to track combat.

These are actually some handy little cards, four to a sheet, with room for an abbreviated cheat-sheet the DM can use to track player activity, initiative, and so forth. Much nicer looking than some.....and totally free, so hard to argue with that. If you just want an initiative tracker and nothing else, there are less complicated free cards out there (and index cards, for that matter) but for a DM looking for cards that act as quick overviews of each PC, these are great.

Initiative cards is a tool for speeding up play, and as such it should present information in a compact, no-nonsense manner. There should be no unnecessary information cluttering up the card; the moment you have to start looking for the information you need the point of using initiative cards is lost.

With this in mind, I wouldn't call this product initiative cards at all. It is in fact tiny character sheets. There are the typical character sheet boxes for calculating defenses, initiative, speed, attack and damage, as well as boxes to keep track of hit points, healing surges, conditions, action points and even xp.

As I'm sure you understand, "tiny" is a relative term here. There are only four cards to a page, meaning each card is near A6 size, which in my opinion is uncomfortably large for a "card."

If you're looking for a small character sheet so you can lay several out in front of you with ease, this might be just what you're looking for. If you're looking for initiative cards, look elsewhere.