Tabletop Card Battle

Minecraft Card Battle

Turn-based card battles for one or two players, played on a 25×25 chunk map inside Minecraft — no separate game, and no client mod required beyond Forge. Face another player, or take on a villager.

How a match works

• You and your opponent — another player, or the villager — take turns on a shared 25×25 map. Each turn you may move, gather, craft, smelt, play cards and attack; the battle screen draws the whole table itself: map, hand, board, action feed and buttons.
• Gathering yields the materials of the biome you stand in. Spend a torch and you mine instead — ores, coal, gold and, yes, diamonds.
• Crafting behaves like a vanilla table with a server-authoritative cursor: left/right click, drag, shift-click piles, drag-to-distribute.
• Smelting turns N furnaces into a batch of 3N input for N fuel, and a settled product can be taken out even while the next batch is still burning.
• Combat has real depth: armour reduces damage per worn piece, and the pieces an attack wears down are exactly the pieces that reduced the damage; weapons have their own reach and damage curves.

What makes it different

• Everything is drawn in the world. The tabletop, the cards, the buttons and the animations are hand-drawn at runtime — there is no separate GUI framework to install.
• A map you can read. 53 overworld biomes collapse into 45 distinct colours, so one glance at the board tells you which biome a chunk belongs to. Modded or datapack biomes can be given exact colours in config/cardbattle-biome-colors.json; anything unknown gets a stable colour derived from its id.
• Balance lives in a text file. config/cardbattle/config.txt is generated on first launch and holds health and hunger, action costs, armour values per piece, weapon damage by distance, gather weights, map size and turn timings.

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.20.1 with Forge 47.2.0 (any Forge 47+ build).
• Nothing else. No library dependency.

Configuration On first launch the mod writes config/cardbattle/config.txt. Delete the file to regenerate defaults; old configs keep working — new keys fall back to their defaults.

Known limits

• The battle screen is designed for the default GUI scale; at very small window sizes the table compresses and the hand scrolls rather than overlapping the map.
• Player versus player works — invite someone and you share the same table, each with your own hand, identity and turn — but it has had far less playtesting than the villager match. Please report anything odd.
• The villager opponent is a rules-driven AI rather than a second player.