Everything on the Decklab blog tagged “tutorial”: practical advice on making your own card game.
Cards that don't fit their sleeves, boards whose pieces don't meet, tokens that miss the punch. Almost always it's the print dialog quietly scaling your page. Here's how to check your printer in two minutes and fix it for good.
· 4 min read
Plenty of card games need a board to play on: a map, a track or a battlefield. Here's how to choose between hexes and squares, size the cells, print a board bigger than your paper, and put it together.
· 4 min read
Your best playtesters might live on another continent. Here's how to turn your cards into Tabletop Simulator deck sheets, load them in a few clicks, and run a useful remote playtest.
· 4 min read
A deck box that's a millimetre too tight is useless, and one that's too loose rattles. Here's how to size, print, cut and fold a tuck box for your prototype, sleeved or not.
Paper, printer settings, cut marks, backs and sleeves. Everything you need to turn a card game file into a deck you can shuffle, using a home printer and an evening.
· 4 min read
Fast prototyping isn't cutting corners. It's shortening the distance between a concept and a playable test. Here's a compressed, step-by-step workflow that gets cards on the table in a single session.
· 5 min read
For many tabletop designers the bottleneck isn't creativity, it's translation. Here's how to get from scattered notes, spreadsheets and old card files to testable cards in an evening, without days of manual formatting.
· 5 min read
The belief that you need an artist, a writer and a layout designer before your first playtest is backwards. Here's a solo workflow that gets a collectible card game prototype to the table, and proves the idea before you spend on anyone.
· 5 min read
The gap between "I have a cool concept" and a testable card prototype is where most promising games stall. Here's a repeatable process for crossing it, from a one-line idea to a deck on the table.
· 5 min read
Conventional wisdom says refine before you build. It's often wrong. The fastest path to a better game is a rough but playable prototype you can test today, and here's a four-step way to build one.
· 4 min read
Most indie designers aren't slowed down by creativity but by workflow friction. Here's how to pick tools when getting from idea to playtest is the priority, and a four-step test to run on any of them.
· 5 min read
