Designing a Deck of Timeline Cards for Tabletops and Tabletop Simulator

Just as authors or publishers use word processors to create printed books, designers of tabletop games regularly use digital tools to create paper prototypes of their work. This tutorial will introduce you to two of these specialized digital tools: Andrea Nini’s nanDECK and Tabletop Simulator.

This tutorial will show how students can create their own digital versions of games using the chronology building mechanic popularized by Frederic Henry’s commercial game, Timeline.

This lesson demonstrates how to use nanDECK to design and publish your own deck of printed or digital playing cards, and use them to test a group’s knowledge of historical events through a Timeline-like game mechanic. This lesson will also highlight best practices for handling digitized historical objects.

#Reviewed by:

• Chris Young
• Adam Porter

#Learning outcomes

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

• Make you own version of the tabletop card game ‘Timeline’, either for play or teaching purposes
• Use two digital tools commonly used by both amateur and professional game designers: nanDECK and Tabletop Simulator
• Understand the importance of games as a kind of ‘literacy’