Printable Dvorak

Dvorak is a Nomic-style card-game, where players can add to (or remove from) the game while playing. More information on the game can be found on the Dvorak Website. Read it first; without it, this is not going to make much sense.

There are lots of archived games on the website that can be played "out of the box"; and although part of the fun of Dvorak is drawing the cards yourself, you typically want to print these ready-made games in a card-like format to play your first game.

On the Dvorak Mailing list the subject of printing cards comes up once in a while, and Kevan created a "Big Card" look on his website, but a really easy way to print a sheet of cards is not there yet. So I decided to give it a shot.

The first release

The first version of the Printable Dvorak Suite read in the MUSH definitions from the website and turned them into simple HTML. that version is still available:

Printable Dvorak Mark I

The second release

Then a long discussion on the Dvorak mailing list inspired me to write a program that handles files in the so-called Dvorak Deck Definition format, that allows a lot more control over the lay-out of the cards. It goes back to the sneak preview of cards I hand-crafted earlier; This version of the program can actually create cards like that. I hereby proudly present:

Printable Dvorak Mark II

The release on the Dvorak website

Kevan Davis has incorporated the deck-printing script into his wesite. Since then, some features have been added, most notably the following: it is now possible to select from several different card-designs on the site, and the script will create cards using that design. See the Dvorak Website for this release!

For off-line card-creation, this new version will not work, as it is tied too intimately to Kevan's website. You can use Printable Dvorak Mark II for that.

The DDD format

For the new versions of the deck-printing script you will need to create decks in the DDD format. Here's the documentation of the format.

The future

Here are some ideas for future enhancements. This is the combined list of all the ideas that came up after the first release; I just repeat them here, and strike out all things that have been done.

• Adding a very small bottom line with attributions, like

  Card: Kevan

  or

  Artwork: Anonymous

• Automatically adding artwork. For this, you would need an input file that specifies an image resource.
• Adding Special Rule cards. Actually, I already did this: If you specify a card like this:

  Teams/S/This game is for two players, called Teams (as there also is a Player card).

  it will turn into a card of type "Special" with a gray bar.
• Printing the special rules for the game in another format. Now, a printed deck of cards is not a standalone game, since you need the extra rules.
• Highlighting categories. Now, the words "Thing" and "Action" are highlighted; it would be nice to have a standard way to highlight other words, like "Person", "Planet" or "Noise" as well.
• "Skinning" feature, where you can specify background colours or pictures for various parts of the card. (Mostly)
• It should be possible to specify card layout as a separate entity, thus allowing multiple possible lay-outs.
• It is currently not possible to derive a card from multiple categories.
• Although the program structure allows as many levels as you want, the current layout only shows the parent's name as the category name. Together with the bar colour and the bar-text-colour this allows for two (or possibly three) visible layers, but not more; it is not possible to refer to a card's grandparent in the card layout.
• Although the format of a Deck Definition looks like a CSS, it is a subset. Notably, it is not possible to specify the same properties for more tags, like:

      ship, computer {
          text-background-colour: #ccff66;
      }
  

  or to specify properties for tags within tags, like:

      ship computer {
          text-background-colour: #ccff66;
      }
  

• All cards in the deck use the 'deck' background and text colour.
• It is not possible to override the 'bar' background and colour for a single card.
• It would be nice to specify more Dvorak Game properties, like number of players, rating, extra stuff needed, status of the deck.
• Ideally, this non-card stuff should be printed in the form of a little 'rule book' that has the same size as the cards. That way, you have room for a lot of extra text and extra information, both in print and on the web-site.
• The card-printing engine and the website script should be separated again.
• It would be nice to have a submission form on the website that accepts DDD and produces printable cards.

Epilogue

If you have any questions, comments or improvements on the designs or the program, please let me know. All this work is released to the public domain.