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.
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. Clicking the card picks up the whole folder; the right-click menu turns it 90° or 180° about its own middle.
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 — a step in pixels, or a number of divisions across and down. Divisions cut the trim into equal parts, so thirds stay thirds when you resize the card.
- 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 and cut line — see below.
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, ⌘3 the field outlines. What a drag snaps to is next door, under the magnet — each line has its own switch there.
Size, DPI and bleed
A card's size is physical: millimetres or inches at a DPI. The boxes accept either, and converting between them goes through the card's own DPI — so a 5 pt heading here is a 5 pt heading in Affinity or InDesign. Changing the DPI resamples the layout rather than rescaling your intent.
Bleed is print margin reserved on every side. Fields keep their coordinates relative to the trim, so artwork meant to run off the edge simply extends past the card — a negative x, an oversized width. 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.