Making cards and decks

Making a card

The editor has two tabs at the top: Cards and Decks. On the Cards tab, the left side lists every card in the game. Search by name, game or type, filter by archetype, or tick Homemade only.

1. Press + New card.
2. Name it.
3. Pick an archetype. The form only asks for what that kind of card needs:
   • Number: its number. It tells you whether that's Small, Medium or Large, and warns you that an 8 is a crazy eight (wild).
   • Familiar: Small, Medium or Large.
   • Action: Event or Counter. For an Event, pick what it does: skip, reverse, make someone draw (you set how many), peek, strike, shuffle or swap hands.
   • Resource: Junk, Material or Property (what it sells for).
   • Story: Location, Role, Objective or Prompt.
   • Lord: up to 4 powers. For each, pick what it does, its cost (1–4 Lord mana) and a name. Each power is described in plain words as you build it.
4. Color, Types and Matches by name. Types are things like "Fire" or "Cat", separated by commas. Matches by name decides whether cards with the same name can go on each other.
5. Card text (optional) shows when someone holds the card down. Use it for flavor, or for a rule the table agrees to judge.
6. Origin and Made by are for show. They appear when someone inspects the card.
7. Press Save card. The line under the button says if anything's missing.

The preview is exactly how the card looks in the game. Whatever you pick works in real games straight away, and bots can play it too.

Pictures

Drag a picture onto the card, paste one (Ctrl+V), or press Choose a picture. On a phone, that opens your photos.

• In the frame keeps the card's color, corner number and name around your picture.
• Whole card makes the picture the entire face, which is best for a scan of a real card.

Pictures stretch to fit the card, so nothing is cut off. A picture that's 5 wide by 7 tall looks best. Big photos are shrunk automatically.

Changing built-in cards

Click any card that came with the game and change anything about it: its name, numbers, color, even a Lord's powers. Your version replaces the card everywhere it's played, in every deck, and it shows an orange Edited badge.

Restore the original puts it back the way it shipped. Giving a card a picture on its own doesn't count as changing it.

Want both versions? Press Make a homemade copy instead and change the copy.

Building a deck

A deck is a recipe: a list of rows, and each row adds cards to the deck. On the Decks tab:

• + New deck starts from Experimental 2's counts, one row per kind of card. It's the quickest start: change the numbers, narrow a pool, or add a row of your own cards.
• + Empty deck starts from nothing.
• Save as a copy makes a new deck from any deck, so you can keep the original.

Rows

Exact cards

Specific cards and how many copies of each. Press + Add cards on the row, then tap cards in the list on the left: each tap adds a copy, and − / + change the count. For example: exactly 3 Sir Fluffingtons.

Random, by filter

"So many cards from a pool," picked again every game, so no two games are the same. Narrow the pool by archetype, size, kind (such as Junk or Counter), the game it comes from, and color, or leave out wilds and 8s. The row shows sample cards and how many kinds match. For example: 15 Medium familiars, only from Pokémon.

Random, from a list

Random cards from a list you pick. A card listed twice is twice as likely, like the two of each number in an Uno deck. The number under each card is how many are in the bag.

A random row uses every card in its pool before repeating one. Mix all three kinds of row in one deck as you like.

Checking a deck

The bar at the bottom shows:

• Total: how many cards are in the deck.
• The mix: how many of each archetype it has.
• Warnings: things that tend to make games bad, such as no Mana, colorless Events that clog hands, or Large familiars with no Large Numbers to feed them. They're advice, not rules: you can save anyway.

Sim this deck plays 200 quick games with bots and tells you:

• how long games last;
• how often players are stuck with nothing to play;
• which moves get used;
• how games end.

It's the fastest way to tell if a deck plays well before trying it with people.

Press Save deck and it's in the lobby straight away. Whoever starts the game picks it there.

The decks that come with the game

Experimental 2, Experimental, Classic Uno and Sample open in the deck builder like any other deck, so you can change them too. The lobby plays your version.

The originals are kept safe: Restore the original puts a deck back the way it shipped.

Online: the owner approves

When the game is hosted online, whoever runs it is the owner. Everyone else is a guest, and that changes one thing:

• Guests make cards and decks exactly the same way, but the button says Send for approval. What they send isn't used in any game until the owner says yes. Put your name in Made by so the owner knows it's yours.
• The owner presses Owner sign-in and types the owner password. The Approvals tab then lists everything waiting, with a preview, who sent it, and whether it's new or a change to a card that's already in the game. Approve puts it in the library; Reject moves it to the recycle bin.

Approve a guest's cards before their deck that uses them.

Nothing is ever deleted outright: removed, rejected and overwritten files are kept in library/.trash/, named with the time, so anything can be put back by hand.

Sharing

Export on a card or a deck gives you one file with everything needed:

• the deck;
• every homemade or edited card it uses;
• their pictures.

At a friend's house, drag that file onto their editor, or press Import a file.

For whoever runs the game: everything is plain files you can commit.

• homemade and edited cards: library/cards/
• decks: library/decks/
• pictures: assets/cards/