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7. Play

Now you have designed your game, you can play it by either:

  1. Printing it out (the Output tab helps with this)
  2. Playing the game virtually, which is what this page is about

Tabletop Simulator (TTS)

TTS is a popular app for playing tabletop games.

Exporting from Card Game Builder

Choose File > Export > Tabletop Simulator... from the menu, or click the Tabletop Simulator Export button on the Output tab.

The Tabletop Simulator export page, with three decks, a PDF rulebook and a bag of dice selected

Card Game Builder (CGB) exports a single bag, which can contain:

  • Decks - choose which of your decks to include.
  • Rules - each set of rules can be added as a notecard, which only has room for a short summary, or as a PDF rulebook, which can hold your full rules.
  • Components - bags of dice and counters, in any of Tabletop Simulator’s colours. Set how many go in each bag, or click the infinity button for a bag that never runs out.

The bag is saved as a TTS Saved Object - a JSON file, plus images of the card fronts and backs, and any PDFs.

We’ll try and save them in these locations:

  • macOS: ~/Library/Tabletop Simulator/Saves/Saved Objects
  • Windows: Documents\My Games\Tabletop Simulator\Saves\Saved Objects
  • Linux: ~/.local/share/Tabletop Simulator/Saves/Saved Objects

Loading into TTS

Click the Objects menu at the top of the screen. You’ll find your bag under Saved Objects.

Playing with other people

Hint

The exported bag refers to its images and PDFs by their location on your computer. Other players can’t load them from there, so the cards appear blank for them.

The easiest fix is to let TTS upload them to your Steam Cloud, so every player can load them:

  1. Load the bag into a game, from Objects > Saved Objects.
  2. Open Modding > Cloud Manager at the top of the screen.
  3. There’s an Upload All button at the top of the Cloud Manager which looks like an upwards arrow. It uploads every file the game is using, and points the game at the uploaded copies.
  4. Save again, so the new locations are kept. Right click the bag and choose Save Object, or save the whole game (from the top of the screen select Games > Save and load).

Each Steam account has a certain amount of free cloud storage, which is plenty for most card games.

If you change your cards, export again from CGB and repeat these steps.

Alternatively, you can upload the images and PDFs to a file hosting service or your own server, and edit the JSON file to point at the new locations.