I Don't Know, What Do You Want To Play?

I Don't Know,
What Do You Want To Play?

This page is for recording the ongoing development of the deck generation utility.

Thanks to all who have tried out our card generation and have offered feedback. Thanks in particular to those at Spielbany, BGDF and BGG

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Release Notes & Planned Revisions

The (nearly) current list of suggestions/revisions:

  • BGG wiki tags, make sure they get replaced with appropriate text. This one is at the top of the list. Here is the bgg wiki reference Now complete, BGG handles this for us and sends us html formatted text which we can just strip
  • Description/comment truncation, fix this big issue, and sort out the margins so more text will fit. Also, look to remove extra blank lines, etc.
  • Specific Games, allow the creation of a set of cards for just specific games rather than a whole collection.
  • Discard Pile and Play pile cards, these indications could be added to the rules card and to the bgg card to be used to designate those respective piles. Very nice suggestion, I'll be doing this one. done! Thanks for the idea sbabcock.
  • Ratings and rankings, Display Bgg ratings, bgg rank and user's ratings on the cards. The ratings and user ratings are now displayed, but no one hase requested rank, so I consider this done.
  • long game names, some of them overlap the playtime, or trail off the edge of the card
  • max/min player numbers, for example Dvorak says 2-0 players.
  • image retrieval errors, kill the pdf generation prematurely (sorry Aljovin), just need to fill out the error handling which wasn't neccesary when no one else was using this :-)Put a quick fix in, so if there is an error getting the thumbnail it will still continue to make the pdf, but it won't go the extra mile and try to get the actual full-size image.
  • Designer names, occasionally are too long and run off the side of the card, add some line wrapping. This should be handled, we now have two lines and no complaints just yet
  • Comments & BGG Description, We want our cake and to eat it as well. See if both can be made to play nicely together.
  • Acrobat printing, add to the instructions to indicate versions other than 7.0
  • page order, how about something useful, like alphabetical?
  • idkwdywtp, the name of the game on the side of the card is absurdly large and distracting. modified that, how does that work for you Scott?
  • GAMEID and PUBLISHERID and theme links, these should get translated in a meaningful way, this may require some changes from BGG.
  • game weight, scored from 1 to 5 would be nice
  • game id, displayed somewhere on the page (Scott wants "near the top"), probably makes sense to make this optional.
  • mechanics and category, list of keywords would be great, yes, another thing that would need to be done on the BGG side first. Aldie stole my excuse here, the data is now provided, just need to integrate it.
  • short description, option from BGG would be great, has to be done there first.
  • operational stuff, like deleting old files etc.
  • maintain flexibility, so that users can decide which info they do and don't want on the cards.
  • card back, possible somehow? I'll have to think about that one a bit. The naive way would be to just generate two files, one front and one back in the same order, but that wouldn't neccesarily collate properly, you would probably need to order the backs slightly differently (ie grouped into 6's, or whatever tiling, and then reverse the groups). Or, if your printer will print fronts and backs, then you'll want one file with the fronts and backs mixed in groups of n, with the backs properly re-ordered. Of course there's the far future where the generated pdf's could be pre-tiled (don't hold your breath).
  • templatize the options, so as to accomodate multiple uses, information preferences and even sizes
  • user tagged images, use this feature of a collection to used the users's preferred image. This might be difficult to get at, and would be much easier if this info was provided by BGG in their xmlapi. Aldie added this, so it's off to work
  • user tags, to filter a user's list, this would be sweet, if the data were provided in the xmlapi.

Feedback

Have fun! The rules are included on a card in the deck. As always, if you have ideas, complements or complaints you can email us.

Lastly, by request, if you find this utility indispensable, please consider contributing to further development, hosting etc.