Card games

Build a card game with no code: card rolls, costs and effects, answers, resources with a bank and recipes, rule templates and the test bench.

Use it to make cards do in your system what dice do in others: resolve a test, decide who acts first, cost something to play, answer each other or count as resources that get traded. Everything is built with boxes and no code, and nothing comes pre-set from any game: the deck, the suits and the rules are whatever you choose.

You test a thing in the same place where you build it, so the natural path is to go from top to bottom and look at the Test bench at the end.

The suggested order

1. Deck and rules. Create the deck in the system's Decks section (or start from a ready one and tweak only what you need). In Rules you decide how drawing works, who sees the hands, which zones the table has and how many seconds there are to answer.
2. Cards. Give them a name, a value, a suit or the fields of your own you defined. Tweaking a card from a ready-made deck does not force you to rewrite the whole deck.
3. Effects. Inside each card, under Cost and effects: what it costs to play, what happens and when, and whether it can answer someone else's play.
4. Resources. If your game has cards that pile up and get traded, turn it on under Resources and trading.
5. Test. The Test bench shuffles a hand and lets you try everything.

Rule templates

Every place where something is set up (the deck, a card and a card roll) offers Rule templates. They are generic starting points that apply with one click and are then edited like anything else. They are not named games: they are patterns.

A template never overwrites what you already have without telling you. Card templates only add (they do not delete costs or effects that were there). If a template is going to change something already set, it tells you what and asks for confirmation before touching it.

The card roll

A card roll is used wherever dice would go: in a field's test, in a sheet button, in a combat action's hit roll or in combat initiative (pick Card roll as the initiative mode).

You fill it in with boxes:

• Deck: which one the cards come from. You pick it from the list of your system's decks.
• Where they come from and how many: revealed from the deck, drawn into the hand, or the hand you already hold is evaluated. The amount can be a number or a formula using sheet fields.
• How they are grouped: sum, the highest, the lowest, a count of cards that meet something, combinations or a twenty-one count.
• Success conditions: reach a total, a certain suit or rank shows up, pairs, three of a kind, a run, same suit, a joker, or a condition of your own. With several, you pick whether all are needed or one is enough.
• Degrees of success: labels by total (for example "Partial success" from 1, "Full success" from 5).

The roll shows up in the chat like any other, with the cards, the total and the result.

Card effects

Under Cost and effects, in the card panel:

• Cost to play it: discard cards from the hand (filtered by suit, rank, tag or value), pay with cards from a zone or spend a sheet field.
• What it does and when: when played, drawn, discarded, or when your turn starts or ends. Effects can draw, move cards, activate another card, cancel the play it answers, apply a state, add to the next roll, change a sheet field, write a message or make a card roll.
• Can answer another play: mark the card as an answer and, if you want, say which tags it answers.

Answers

For answers to work you need two things: cards marked as answers and, in the deck rules, seconds to answer (with 0 there is no window and effects apply right away). When someone plays a card with effects and another person has a possible answer, the play waits: the responder plays their card, answers resolve in reverse order and a "cancel" card cancels the play it answers.

Resources, trading and recipes

Under Resources and trading:

• Resource tag: if you set one, only cards with that tag count as resources.
• Shared bank: keeps cards in plain sight and swaps them at the rate you set (for example four for one), with your own prices for the cards you want.
• Recipes: "spend 2 of A and 1 of B to receive C". Each recipe has a name, what it spends, what it gives (from the bank or the deck) and, if you want, effects.
• Offers between players: one person offers cards, the other accepts, declines or answers with another offer.

The test bench

At the end of each deck's rules there is the Test bench. It does three things:

1. Checks the rules and tells you, with the reason, what is missing: answer cards without time to answer, a bank that exchanges nothing, a recipe without a name or with a part that has no card picked, a cost pointing at something not chosen.
2. Shuffles a sample hand from your deck. Press Shuffle and deal as often as you like.
3. Lets you try everything with that hand: make a card roll (the system's rolls that use that deck, or an example) and see the cards, the total, the result and how it would read in the chat; tap a card in the hand and play it to see what it pays and what it does; and make a recipe on a sample hand of resources.

None of it touches a game: it is a throwaway test to see that your rules do what you think before taking them to the table.

Tags on cards

Every card can carry up to ten tags: single words such as "fire", "attack" or "resource", separated by commas. You type them on the card itself, under the text, and you can type spaces and commas freely: the list tidies itself when you leave the field.

Tags are what ties cards to the rest of the table: card draw filters, reply cards, the resource tag and macros all use them to say "a fire card" without naming it.

Cards in macros and zones

In a macro (or a zone action) you have these steps for cards. All of them let you pick the deck from a list (or leave it empty to use the first one on the table):

• Move cards of a deck: draw, deal, shuffle, collect or reveal the top card.
• Play a card from my hand: pick it by name, label or tag. It pays its cost as if you played it by hand and does its effects. With the card box empty, it plays the first card in hand.
• Discard cards from my hand, move one to a zone on the table, show one to the table and turn or straighten the ones lying on the table.
• Give a card to another player: the GM can give any card of the deck (in the deck, the discard pile or another hand); a player, one of their own.
• Make a card draw roll: how many, where they come from (the deck face up, drawn, or your hand), how they are counted and what happens to them afterwards. It shows in the chat like any roll.
• Make a deck recipe by name.

The play, discard, move to zone and show steps act on the hand of whoever runs the macro: the server does not let anyone move another person's hand. If something cannot be done (the card is not in the hand, the cost cannot be paid) the macro says why instead of failing silently.

Macros that fire when something happens with cards

A macro can fire on its own when:

• a card is played,
• a card is drawn,
• a card is discarded,
• a deck runs out,
• a hand is emptied.

In "Only if…" you can narrow it by deck, card, player, suit, value and, above all, tags: "when a card is played whose tags contain *fire*". Macros that fire on their own are run by the GM, so they work while the GM has the table open. A macro that moves cards does not wake other macros with what it causes itself.

The hand in character sheets

In sheet formulas you can use what is in the hand and the zones of the sheet's owner:

The names mano (hand) and zona (zone) stay in Spanish, like the rest of the formula language. An empty hand is worth 0 in everything, and a card without a value counts as 0. When you type "mano" or "zona" in the formula editor they show up as suggestions.

Editing a card while the game is running

With the deck already on the table, the GM (or the owner of a per-player deck) edits it from Edit deck. Changes also apply to copies already dealt: every copy of a card reads from the same definition. You can change the rank, tags, custom fields and copies; in the Tinta editor you can also change extra faces, effects and cost.

If you empty something (say, you delete all the tags) it is really removed from the card.

Exporting and importing a deck

The deck editor has two buttons, Export and Import:

• Whole deck (JSON): suits, fields, cards with everything they carry, table rules, zones, challenges and recipes. Use it to carry the deck to another system or campaign, or to keep a copy.
• Cards as a table (CSV): one row per card with name, label, value, suit, rank, text, image, tags, copies and one column per custom field. It opens in any spreadsheet. The table carries no effects or costs: when you import it over a deck, cards with the same id keep theirs.

Importing never overwrites blindly. Before touching anything it shows how many cards would be added, which would change and which would be removed, and asks. You can import a whole deck (replaces the current one, or adds its cards) or a table (adds or updates, or replaces all cards). At the table, the GM also has Export in each deck's menu.

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