Designing cards

A card is one thing that could happen, whether a beat, an encounter, a topic, or a bark. Cards live in decks, and a deck lives in a box. This page is the everyday loop of designing them.

The deck

Open a deck and its Cards tab shows every card in it. A switch at the top right of the page offers three views of the same cards.

Card view shows each card as a face, with its title, its condition as an if preview beneath, its purpose as body text, and its tag chips. Each tag keeps its own colour, so you learn your zones and your cast by colour and can scan a deck fast.

Table view puts title, gameId, When, Where, and Tags down columns, for scanning a long deck. Where is the card’s placement (its home hands and regions), and Tags is everything else, the same split the card’s own Dealing tab draws.

Node view shows the cards as nodes, with the arrows between them worked out for you. This is a deck’s default view, and it has its own page.

The switch is remembered, so a deck opens the way you left it.

A card carries no player-facing text. Its purpose is its story as far as your team is concerned, and reading a deck top to bottom reads the story’s beats. Priority, redraw, and copies aren’t on the face; they’re one click away, inside the card.

Getting around and editing works like this.

• Click a card to open its document. The deck stays highlighted in the navigator.
• Add a card with + New card at the end of the deck, or File ▸ New Card (Shift+Cmd+N). On the node canvas, right-click for New card here.
• Drag to reorder. The order is only how the editor lists the cards; it has no effect on which card comes up. (Outcomes are the one place where the order you choose does reach the game. Right-click one for Move up and Move down.)
• Right-click a card for Duplicate and Delete. Cmd+D duplicates the selection.
• Inside a card, Esc goes back to the deck, and the stepper beside the trail (↑ / ↓) moves to the previous or next card without going back.

The deck’s other tabs are Dealing (the condition for any card in this deck, plus Shared across playthroughs, which makes the whole pile scarce in the world rather than one each per playthrough) and Properties (the deck’s own @deck state).

Whether you’re shown Shared across playthroughs depends on the project’s Play setting. A solo project hasn’t got it. A project whose Play setting reads Venue (set by the server it came from) also gets Durable beside it.

The card document

The identity heading holds the title, the gameId chip, and the purpose. Below it are three tabs.

A card's Dealing tab: the condition (labelled When), then Priority, Redraw and Copies, then the Where row saying where the card can come up.

Dealing

Everything about how this card gets dealt is on one page.

• The When row is the condition to be dealt, written in the expression editor. It knows your project’s declared properties, so it offers the names that exist. A property pill answers for itself. Hover it for the property’s purpose (and, for a quality, its ladder of stages), and right-click it for Go to definition, which opens the property where it’s declared and lands on it, opened and lit for a moment, and Find usages, which opens Find on everything that reads or writes it. The same works on the pills in an outcome’s changes.
• Priority is what cards are ordered on, and higher goes first. The hint under it changes with your box. If the box has Rank by specificity on, priority only breaks ties between cards that ask for the same amount; if it’s off, priority decides the order outright.
• Redraw is whether a played card can be dealt again. It’s a three-way switch, always / never / turns, with a number field that wakes up when you pick turns. The number is counted in this box’s own turns.
• Copies is how many hands may hold this card at once. One copy is the rule; more is for interchangeable filler.
• Shared across playthroughs is whether this card is scarce in the WORLD rather than one each per playthrough, which is the difference between “everyone can find the goblin” and “only the first player to find it gets it”. There are three settings, not two. deck (shared) or deck (not shared) takes whatever the deck says, and the label tells you which so you can see why a card in a shared pile is scarce without opening the deck. shared and not shared override it for this card alone.
• The In the world field is how many copies exist across every playthrough, when the card is effectively shared. It’s offered only then, because on an unshared card it does nothing. It defaults to Copies, so the common “one in the world, one to a customer” needs nothing set.
• Durable appears on a project whose Play setting reads Venue, beside Shared and in the same three settings. The value survives the run boundary the server it came from draws.
• The Where row is the one you reach for most. It answers “where does this card come up?” in a sentence, such as Anywhere, or The Inn, or anywhere in the forest, or a combination. Change opens a picker with two sections, Places (the box’s hands, each showing the region it sits in) and the region groups. Choosing a place pins the card to exactly that place; choosing a region lets it come up anywhere inside one. Choosing both means BOTH must match, which is usually a mistake, so the row says so when the place you picked isn’t in the region you picked.
• The Tags section is one row per remaining tag group, each a strip of chips you toggle. Place and region groups aren’t here, because the Where row above owns them. When a card has no tags the section collapses to one line reading “untagged”, with a + to open it.

Outcomes

An outcome is what the player (or your game) can do with the card once it’s dealt, and one card can offer several. The tab is an accordion. Closed outcomes are single rows, and the open one expands into its full editor, with a title, a purpose, its own condition, and its changes, each a property and an expression. Right-click any row for Move up, Move down, Duplicate, and Remove; the open editor also ends with a Remove outcome button.

If the box declares outcome fields, the open outcome also has a Fields block, between its purpose and its condition, with one row per declared field and the same controls as the card’s own Fields tab. They’re what this outcome hands your game once the press lands, the line to show after it, say, and they cost no card. A box that declares none shows no block.

Fields

The box’s card template, as label-and-control rows, one row per declared field. The control follows the field’s type, so boolean and enum fields offer their values in a picker, while string, number, and flags fields are text.

If the box declares no fields, the tab says so and points you at the box’s Card template tab.

Saving

There’s nothing to remember to save. Your edits are written to the project files as you make them, in the same fixed layout every time, and the top bar shows where that has got to (Saved, Saving…, Unsaved). File ▸ Save (Cmd+S) is there for the reflex, and flushes anything still pending. Validation re-runs each time it saves.