Start Here

This blog will cover some of the ideas I had for using CardGameForge.com.

Background

This site was designed entirely from the ground-up. As such, it is probably lacking in some of the features you would find from more robust individual components. The message board system, for example, is missing many of the features you'd find in an Invision or phpBB installation, but it does provide the core functionality, which is to organize topics into threads.

Commercial Games

In addition to adding user-created games, I encourage people to add commercially distributed games to the list. The CardGameForge.com site can still be used to discuss these games, and (where legal) provide printable card sets.

Development Teams

Each game can have a development team, which is basically just a list of usernames that are allowed to edit the game you've created. These "editors" are allowed to do everything you can do, except add/remove the editors (the game author has absolute power in that department).

Game Privacy

I understand that many of you may not want to share all parts of your game. You can set your entire game to private (whitelist user access only). You can also set individual card sets to private (to hide sets you're working on). If you want you can also disable the printing features so that other cannot generate printable PDFs from your cards.

Friendly Game URLs

Each game can also have a friendly url that you can use to spread to other sites where you might be active. For example, if I had a game title "Greatest Game Evar", I could assign the friendly url to be www.cardgameforge.com/games/greatest_game_evar. When someone visits that url, it will be translated to something more cryptic, but the friendly url is easier to remember.

Card Images

At the moment each game is limited to 10MB of images. Currently card images can only be hosted on the site, but in the future I plan to allow linking to externally hosted images (so you can have as many card images as you like by way of a file hosting service).

There is also a feature that allows you to create images for your cards. You can assign the text from your cards to zones on a card template, and the site will auto-generate an image for the card. You can even add your own images to the card templates, as shown below:

Watchlists

When you create an account you can add games to your "Watchlist". In the menu there is a link to quickly show the games in your watchlist. This is a way for you to effectively "bookmark" the games you're interested in. There is also another link for the games you're working on, another way to quickly navigate through the list of games. You can also click on another username you might encounter and find lists of games they are watching or working on.