Ready-made deck templates
The Game Components screen now has a Templates panel in the right column, with a Decks tab, a search box and ready-made templates we prepare for you. Click or drag a template onto the grid, give it a name, and the component is added to your prototype with its default settings — a copy, so editing it never touches the template.
New Deck now opens on a row of starting layouts: Blank, plus six ready-made ones — Playing card, Title/art/text, Character, Resource, Event and Reference. Each gives you a deck with a tagged card template and its first card, already open in the Deck Composer with its columns laid out.
Playing a sample game means playing by its rules
Dropping a card on an empty spot on the playfield is now judged by the game's rules like any other destination, instead of slipping past every check. Across the sample games that closes a long list of holes: Klondike's stock can no longer be raided or used as a dumping ground, chess refuses moves into check and king captures, checkers enforces turn order on drags, gomoku, morpion, tic-tac-toe and reversi no longer let placed pieces be dragged around or onto any pad, Color Pyramid keeps cards inside their set, Belote refuses the deck, won tricks and played cards back into play, and FreeCell's free cells hold what they should.
Improvements
- Card Editor (Color Manager): the New / Edit Swatch window now previews the gradient you are actually editing, following every stop, angle, scale and noise change as you make it.
- Card Editor (Color Manager): a gradient stop can be coloured from the project's own palette — recently used colours first, then your colour sets and folders — and clicking a swatch in the panel behind the picker picks it too.
- Card Editor: the round-corners button now appears only on the toolbars where it can actually round something, and its size controls are the same ones as the stroke thickness.
- Card Editor: the toolbar drag grips look the same on Windows and macOS, and the strip between stacked toolbars no longer lights up as if it could be resized.
- Game Components and Deck Composer: the Import button is gone from the Deck, Playfield and card-template create dialogs; Import from Library stays on a card template's right-click menu.
- Playfield (Set up your table): the first-open setup wizard is a proper dialog with a close button, a focus trap and flat buttons instead of a glowing green one.
- Bring your own AI: the header badge connecting an external agent such as Claude, ChatGPT or Grok is now called "Bring your own AI", with a tidier panel, a close button, Escape to dismiss, and a link to the full guide.
- Bring your own AI: an external agent now gets a named tool for each thing it can do, and every tool that overwrites, replaces or discards your work warns you before it runs.
- Website: a blog is now live in all seven site languages, with the first posts on building a card game a day, Klondike, and the four new solitaires.
- Website: Board Game Lab can now be downloaded as a desktop app for macOS and Windows.
Fixes
- Card Editor: Bring to front, Bring forward, Send backward and Send to back no longer make every block of the template disappear until you reopen the editor.
- Deck Composer: a card's back no longer shows another card's back once a deck has five or more distinct backs.
- Game Components: importing a deck from another project keeps two pictures that share a label apart, so a card no longer shows the wrong art, and a second imported deck no longer turns every face card into the same one.
- Card Editor: leaving an editor saves your work once, instead of several overlapping saves of the same template.
- Play: the "Your name" field on the host and guest landing no longer shows Chrome's autofill suggestions.