What is Deckle?

Deckle helps board game designers and hobbyists create game components quickly and easily. Whether you're prototyping a new game or preparing files for print-on-demand services, Deckle streamlines the design process.

The overarching project goal is to provide tools to help game designers and developers design, prototype, playtest and iterate upon their game ideas.

Features

• Project Management: Organize your game components into projects
• Component Designer: Create custom components, such as cards, player mats and game boards
• Data Integration: Connect to Google Sheets to automatically create and update entire decks
• Export Ready: Generate print-ready files for your game components

And more of a meta one aimed at the devs/technically-minded among us:

• Source Available: All Deckle code is public. If there's something you think needs improving then go for it! No need to file an issue and wait for me to get to it; just fork the repo, make the change, and PR it back to the main project when complete

Future Goals

I'm not 100% sure on these yet, hopefully by the time I'm nearing in to them there'll be something of a community around Deckle that can help steer the project. However a couple of ideas that are kicking around in the back of my mind are:

• Easy export to print on demand services:
• Shareable project pages. Possibly with free/paid PNP download options
• Playable prototypes: As well as exports to TTS / Tabletopia / Screentop etc, I'm considering a basic way to play Deckle prototypes directly within Deckle, massively cutting down the time it takes to get your game from playable prototyping to experimenting.
• Design tools: Design checklists, balancing tools, etc
• Playtesting: Playtest journals + tools to help track and analyse results. Feedback gathering + data collection

Non-Goals

• High-fidelity design: I have no interest in creating the best visual design tool. If you're looking to create high-quality designs with advanced printing features like CMYK support etc then head over to the much more mature Dextrous, they've got you covered. The aim of Deckle is game design, not graphic design / illustration, so really only looking to create basic prototypes (though hopefully still not totally unattractive).

Getting Started

Deckle is available for use at app.deckle.games. It's totally free to get started, so sign up for an account today!

For guidance on how to use Deckle, see our User Guide

If you wish to run the project locally, either to contribute fixes/features or to self host, then read on (if self hosting, be sure to read the license)