3 min read

Card Decks & Guidebooks on Deckible

Card Decks & Guidebooks on Deckible
Photo by 愚木混株 cdd20 / Unsplash

I often think about how decks differ from books, audio and video as "media formats".

The simplest fact I keep returning to is that books, audio and and video are all a single format.

  • a book
  • a video
  • an audio track

Decks are a combination of:

  • artwork / content (the cards)
  • instructions (the guidebook).

This reality emerged as Deckible took shape.

We quickly landed on having more than two sides to a card, and so we could  handle the portion of a guidebook that correlates/maps to individual cards.

This typically accounts for 90% of the guidebook.

More recently we have found some non-tarot style decks where the guidebook is significant (more than a page or two) and where the content in the guidebook does not relate to a specific card.

And it's been conversations like this that led to the adding of the "Guidebook" links on the Deck Info Page.

Here's a deck with 2 guidebook card. The are simply tagged as "guidebook". (no-shuffle works too (that's the original default - guidebook is simpler and more descriptive). Also you can specify your own guidebook tags by editing the deck and

So here, we click on Deck Info, and the click on "Guidebook" and the we get all the guidebook cards displayed on the canvas.

And here we can pinch,zoom, organize and journal on the card as normal

Guidebook cards are excluded from shuffle

You can place them at the beginning or the end of your card list in Googlesheets.

They will remain in their current position and the shuffleable cards will shuffle.

Al this thinking warrants the following question:

What are the components of a guidebook?

  • Card Specific Content (the 3rd and 4th side)
  • Layout Content - advice and content relating to the layouts of the deck. Generally this should be accommodated by creating custom spreads, but that's your call. Spreads are more useful than guidebook pages as they put things into action.
  • Introductions: Non card specific explanations  and exercises.
  • About: Information about the author / other works
  • Indexes/Intros/Heading: Table of contents, chapter pages, front/back of guide tc etc. These often don't make sense to add to Deckible. It's not a "book" and so migrating your guidebook means in many cards reducing some of these types of pages

You can have all of these. 3rd sides on not included in the guidebook count. Perhaps they should be.

VIDEO

I strongly recommend having a video for your deck. As mentioned before, edit you deck and just use the YouTUBE ID

Very simple

You can use video in the same way with cards

Yes the column is called VIDEO_URL, but just use the Id, that wil change in time to YOUTUBE_ID.

Guidebook cards can have video, just like other cards.

So your guidebook can be super rich

MULTIPLE SIDES PER GUIDEBOOK CARD

And of course you can have more than two sides per card.

So you can control how you chunk your guidebook information.

BEST ADVICE

Buy some decks with guidebooks and explore. See what people have done.

We are all learning, but it's a ridiculously and consistent model. That makes it simple

While decks are made from  two elements:

  • artwork (the cards)
  • instructions (the guidebook).

In Deckible we treat them in the same way

  • 1 to n sides
  • with or without video
  • as many cards as you need
  • tag as guidebook for guidebook
  • no tag required to be part of the main deck

I think having a guidebook will soon become mandatory even if its a single page.

And that is really it.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

People have asked me to write about the guidebook. Hence this post.

It's not complex, it's just evolved a bit.

Guidebooks play a more significant roles today that 3 months ago.