Getting Started

Welcome to the Card Forge creator manual. This guide walks you through everything you need to do to design, test, and publish your very own custom trading card game.

Creating your first game

  1. Sign in and open My Games from the navigation bar.
  2. Click New Game and give your game a name, a short description and an emoji. Then click Create with AI to have the AI draft your properties and first cards (see Create with AI), or Create by hand to start from an empty game.
  3. After that, you'll land on your game's page, which will display all the available tools for you to customize your game.

On your own games, you will be able to switch between editor and player modes.

In Editor Mode, the round ✨ button in the bottom-right corner opens Suggested next steps: a short list of what to do next, each with a button that takes you there. It goes away once your game is published.

The editor tabs

Each game has a set of tabs that will allow you to customize different aspects of your game:

  • Details — title, description and game rules.
  • Deck Builder (Editor Mode) - define the decks to be used by new players and AI opponents.
  • Card Editor - everything related with card creation and customization.
  • Board — define the layout of the game board and placeholder related restrictions, plus a table background, music and sound effects.
  • Collecting — customize the card collecting experience, like card rarities and number of cards per pack.
  • Activity (Editor Mode) — two sub-tabs: Analytics, simple insights on how users are interacting with your game, and Changelog, the dated updates you post for your players.
  • Changelog (Player Mode) — the updates you have posted. Everyone who can see the game can read them; as the creator you write them under Activity → Changelog.

Basic creation flow

Follow these steps when creating your first game:

  1. Go to My Games and click New Game. Give your game a name, a description and an illustrative emoji, then click Create by hand.
  2. In the Details tab, review your description and define your game's rules from the available options.
  3. Go to the Board tab and set the number of rows and columns of your game board.
  4. Go to Card Editor > Card Properties and define the properties that all your Agent/Entity cards must define. Your card properties can be numeric (e.g., attack and cost) or text based. For text based properties, you must also define their possible values, along with their icons (e.g., for an "Element" property it makes sense to define "Fire" and "Water" as possible values).
  5. Go to Card Editor > Effects and create 1 or 2 simple card effects.
  6. Download some images you would like to use on your cards. You can make use of AI image generators like Midjourney to quickly create some unique illustrations for your cards.
  7. Next, go to Card Editor > Cards and click Create Card. Create a handful of cards or however many you need to create a valid deck. Assign your effects to a couple of the cards.
  8. Go to Deck Builder and build a couple of decks from the created cards. Mark at least one deck as a "starter" deck (new players will receive a copy of each starter deck upon their first match), and another as an AI deck, which will be assigned to the AI opponent.
  9. Click Play vs AI in the header to test your game against the AI. This works before publishing too, once your starter and AI decks are valid.
  10. Click Publish to share your creation and allow other users to play your game.
  11. Experiment with different configurations and share your feedback in the discord 🙂 https://discord.gg/EtzeFZKJf5.