Play-test your own card game online

Why a table with no rules engine is the right tool for an unfinished game

Every digital client for a published game enforces that game's rules, which means your game would have to be coded before it could be played. A shared table skips that. Cards are images with text; zones are places on the table; counters count whatever you say they count. If the rules change on Tuesday, nothing has to be re-coded on Wednesday — you play the new rule the way you would at a kitchen table. Nothing stops an illegal play, and for a game whose legality you are still deciding that is a feature.

Getting your cards in

1. Pick a home for the game. Custom Card Games is the deck type for a game the database does not know: it has a play area, a deck, a hand, a discard pile and the rest, and a Card Game field so your cards are filterable as yours. 292,917 cards from other people's games already live there. If you are making custom cards for a published game, use that game's deck type instead and they sit beside the real ones.
2. Add Missing Card, from the deck builder. Give it a name, upload the image, and choose It's a custom, non-legal card. The name and text are read off the image where they can be, so you are not retyping every card. Thirty uploads a month are free.
3. Build a deck from them like any other deck: search, drag, set the counts. Save it, and it is a deck on your account.

Goldfish it, then sit on both sides

Open a Solo game to deal yourself hands and see whether the curve you drew on paper is the curve you get. Then, with a Power Up, open a Deck vs Deck game and seat two of your decks at the same table — Emberling aggro against the Stone Sentinel control list — and play both sides. For a designer this is the most useful mode on the site: you can play out a matchup twenty times in an evening with nobody else's calendar involved, and Rewind lets you take a turn back and try the other line.

Then with your play-testers

New Game → Custom Card Games → send the link. Your testers make a free account, import the deck you share with them (a deck's share link carries the cards, custom ones included), and sit down. Voice is in the table. Every game is recorded, so the play-test session is a replay you can watch back the next morning with notes, and the log says what moved where. Spectators can watch a test without taking a seat, which is how a second designer sees the game without being in it.

When the rules settle: scripts and board helpers

Once a mechanic is stable you can teach the table about it, without writing a rules engine. Untap Script is a small language that runs in your browser and acts through your own ordinary actions: a card script puts a button on a card that does what its text says — draw two, make a token, move a counter — and a board helper lays out furniture for the game (a box for each row, a tray for a resource, a die) and keeps counts. None of it stops a play; all of it saves clicks. The reference is written for exactly this: its examples are an invented game, so nothing in it assumes yours.

What to expect

Cards you upload are visible to other users of the site, so keep the art you own or have the right to use, and keep it within a PG rating; the form says the same before it lets you upload. A card uploaded once can be attached to again — a new printing or a new piece of art goes on the same card rather than making a duplicate, which keeps your decks pointing at one thing as the design changes. And if the game you are making is a game the database does not know but the world does, the Custom Card Games type with its Card Game field is still the right place; thousands of niche published games live there too.