DeckStir

What is it?

DeckStir is a free Windows application for quickly adapting card and dice game ideas into a graphical interface that can then be used to play the game.

The Game Designer Sandbox

As a huge fan of boardgames, I'm always thinking about how cool it would be to design one of my own.  To this end, I spend countless hours coming up with ideas in my head, and even more time attempting to vet them out.  Usually, I start by building a spreadsheet of information about what kinds of game components are involved:  decks, dice, tokens, etc.  Then I find myself spending money to buy blank cards and/or dice to build some of the components, only to discover a major flaw in my design that makes the game unplayable.  At this point, I'm making more cards and more dice, and trying new ideas to make the game better.  Each iteration takes a huge amount of time, and leaves me frustrated enough that I lose interest.

One possible solution, is to use one of the boardgame design tools out there, like Vassal or Cyberboard.  In fact, I took this approach with one of my ideas.  I spent many hours watching tutorial videos, and desigining graphics in GIMP, so that I could build a Vassal module.  This worked fairly well, but making adjustments were complicated.  For example, I'd discover that one particular card type came up too often, so I wanted to adjust the count of that card in the deck.  Not trivial to do (for a novice Vassal designer like myself), and too much work for what may be yet another failed boardgame idea.  While Vassal and Cyberboard are great tools for constructing a platform to play a boardgame, they require too much up-front input to successfully sandbox an idea, in my opinion.

Since I'm also a professional software developer, it made sense to me to develop a solution to this problem.  I wanted a simple tool that could read my spreadsheet ideas, build all the game components on the screen, and let me freely "play" the game.  I wanted support for virtual decks of cards (any rectanglular shape or size), which can be shuffled and dealt in any way that you like.  I also wanted to be able to design a board, provide player tokens, and have a way to keep track of score and other in-game numbers (health, food, resources, etc).  I wanted a big playing surface, so that cards could be arranged in any way (e.g., to form a board), and the ability to customize the cards with graphics, as the game ideas begin to solidify into real playable rules.

DeckStir is that tool. You design the game by building spreadsheets of data defining the individual game components.  DeckStir reads the workbook, and transforms the textual data into a playable user interface for shuffling/dealing cards, moving game tokens, placing markers, tracking game resources, rolling dice, and much more.  Make any change, big or small, and simply reload the workbook.  Play-test as much as you like:  you can even save a game in progress.  Share the workbook with a friend, and work together to make the game even better. Everything you need to get a head start on your game idea.