Cardcraft

Create the cards you want to play

CardCraft Engineering is a strategy card game about making, testing, and refining your own ideas. There is no card pack chase and no luck-gated power curve: start with a blank blueprint, assemble stats and effects, and bring an original deck to the table.

A workshop built for experimentation

• Design cards by combining costs, stats, skills, and readable rules
  
• Build a deck around your own engine instead of copying a collection
  
• Challenge tactical battles against AI or other players through Steam
  
• Enter the five-act Endless Workshop, where cards are fused, inherited, and rebuilt under pressure
  
• Share safe cards, decks, and declarative rulesets in the Steam Workshop

Every choice has a cost, and every victory teaches you something about the machine you are building. CardCraft Engineering is for players who believe creation itself should be part of the game.

A loop that rewards curiosity

Start with a blank blueprint, spend a limited budget, read the rule preview, then take the card into a real fight. A clever +1 can matter more than a flashy effect when your deck has a plan. Between battles you can revise, retire, or rebuild an idea instead of waiting for a lucky drop.

From first prototype to final run

The five-act Endless Workshop turns your collection into a living experiment. Choose routes, bargain with the merchant, manage strain, and decide which cards deserve a lineage. Early acts teach the system; later acts demand discipline. No two runs need to solve the same problem.

Made to be shared safely

The Steam Workshop supports cards, decks, and declarative rules modules. Uploaded content is validated as data, never executed as a program, and rulesets are isolated so incompatible versions cannot enter the same match. Build a strange idea, test it, and let the community answer with a better one.

A note from the creator

The hand-drawn paper-card prototype that started the project.
CardCraft Engineering began during the school lockdown of my second year of high school. Our phones were put away, so a few friends and I drew cards on scraps of paper and played a handmade version of a card battler. It was rough, immediate, and endlessly fun.

Later I played commercial card games and ran into the wall that inspired this project: without opening packs, the cards needed for a new deck were simply out of reach. I wanted a game where the interesting part was making the card, not chasing it. The idea followed me through my final school year. During my first university break I chose Godot because it was light and approachable, then built a small prototype called General Simulator to learn the craft. The real system still fought back through the following semester.

The turning point was the arrival of coding agents such as Codex. They helped me turn long stretches of design and debugging into quick prototypes I could actually play. By the break after my second year, the core of CardCraft Engineering was finally on the table. This game is the result of that long loop: draw an idea, test it, rebuild it, and keep going.