Blueprints
A blueprint is the layout, and the layout is shared. Everything on this page is a way of arranging what every card has in common.
Two faces
A blueprint has a front and a back, each with its own background colour, corner radius and list of fields. A back can also be a single image, which is what most decks want. A board or a tile usually has no back at all. The flip button in the top bar turns the card over to its other side — or, in the deck's grid, every card at once.
Fields
| Text | Words, with inline markup and icons — see Text and markup |
| Image | Artwork, fitted to its box: cover, contain, stretch, fit width, fit height or tiled, with flip, tint, radius and a drop shadow |
| Shape | Rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, polygon, star or line, with fill and stroke |
| QR code | A URL or a rules snippet, drawn at the largest module size that fits — it warns rather than silently drawing something no phone can scan |
Every field has a rectangle in card pixels, an opacity, a rotation and a visibility
switch. Any of them may read {column} tokens — a path, a colour, a number,
not only the text.
Fields that follow another field
Set a field's mirror to another field's id and it draws as a copy of it: the content and the styling follow the source, per card, while its own position, rotation and opacity stay its own. A back-face title can echo the front this way, and one edit reaches both.
Fields that vanish when they are empty
Visible if skips the field when the value it names resolves to nothing. A "flavour text" box that is blank on half the deck simply is not drawn on those cards.
Layers, and what is in front
Fields are painted in order, so the last one is nearest the front. The layers panel lists them the other way up — topmost first, the way every design tool does — with the paint order beside each row. Drag a row to reorder, or use the arrows that appear on hover.
The panel is also how you reach a field the canvas will not give you. A full-bleed background swallows clicks on everything under it; here it is one row you can select, hide or lock.
Groups
⌘G makes the selection a group, ⇧⌘G opens it again. A group is a folder in the layers panel: several fields picked up, hidden, locked and rotated as one — half a card turned 180° for a two-headed layout, say. The right-click menu turns it 90° or 180° about its own middle.
On the canvas a click takes the layer under it, even inside a group; the whole folder is taken by its row in the layers panel. A group, or any selection of several layers, moves as one box: it snaps as one, and a move undoes in one step.
Groups are an arrangement of the field list, not something that draws. A blueprint with every group deleted renders an identical card.
Lines to lay out against
Four things exist purely so that everyone opening the blueprint measures from the same places. None of them is drawn on a card.
- Safe zone / margins — one inset for all four sides, or four named separately for the card that needs room along the bottom it does not need at the top.
- Grid — set in Blueprint Setup: a step, or a number of divisions across and down. Divisions cut the card into equal parts, so thirds stay thirds when you resize it.
- Guides — dragged out of either ruler, moved by dragging, thrown away by dragging off the card, or typed exactly (in millimetres or as a percentage).
- Bleed — the band outside the card's edge; see below.
Margins, the grid and the guides are all measured from the card's edge, which is where it will be cut.
The top bar's Overlays menu decides which of them are drawn and in what colour, remembered per person rather than per blueprint. ⌘; hides the guides, ⌘' the grid; the field outlines have their switch in the menu itself. A press on a number in the menu opens Blueprint Setup at the field it comes from.
What a drag snaps to is next door, under the magnet. Each kind of line has its own switch there, and a snap is drawn in the same colour the Overlays menu draws that line in. The tolerance is measured on the screen, so it feels the same at any zoom. Hold ⌘ during a drag to let go of snapping for as long as it is held — it can be pressed once the drag is already under way.
Size and bleed
A card's size is physical: type it in millimetres, inches or pixels, whichever you think in. There is no DPI to set here. How sharp the printed files come out is chosen when you export, with output DPI — the card is drawn again at that resolution rather than stretched, so a blueprint never has to be laid out "for print".
Content decides what a new size does to the layout. Anchor keeps every field where and as big as it is, pinned to the point you pick; Rescale grows or shrinks the fields, text and effects with the card. A card imported at an odd size is put right by typing the size it should be, with Rescale on.
Turn card, in Blueprint Setup, gives the card a quarter turn, left or right. A portrait card becomes a landscape one and the layout goes round with it, rather than being left lying on its side for you to rebuild.
Bleed is print margin outside the card, on every side. The canvas reaches past the card's edge by the bleed and shows the printed sheet under it, so artwork meant to run off the edge — a negative x, an oversized width — is seen running exactly as far as it will print. The card's own edge is the cut line, and a drag snaps to the bleed's outer edge as well. Screen renders and Tabletop Simulator sheets stay trimmed; print output grows by the bleed and leaves the corners square, because the cut rounds the card, not the file.
The dashed line inside the card is the safe zone. Keep text inside it: a guillotine at a print shop is accurate to about a millimetre, and it is not always the same millimetre on every card in the stack.
Inherited values
A blueprint has a defaults block — a font, a colour — that every field starts from. The inspector shows where each value came from: a solid border means the field says so itself, a dashed one means it is inherited and still following. Clearing a property deletes it rather than writing the inherited value in, so the field goes back to following defaults instead of quietly pinning a copy of them.