LOTC

What is lord of the cards?

A way to take your favourite card games with you. And more.

Import Your Cards

Use LOTC with any card-based game you own by importing photos of your cards and tokens.

Build Decks

Create cards and collect them into decks. Duplicate cards easily, and even create decks you don't have enough physical cards for.

Set Up Games

Use any number of decks, card areas, tokens, token pools, dice, and counters to set up a virtual tabletop for your game.

Play Anywhere

Move cards and tokens around your game setup and change the values of counters etc. as you play. Play your favourite games where you otherwise couldn't: on the move for example, or where there's no table.

Save, Duplicate & Log Games

Duplicate whole game setups and run more than one game at once, or 'save' at specific points in the game to replay from there, for example. LOTC logs all actions in a game setup as well.

Save Table Space

Use LOTC to manage the deck, card, token, and counter components of any of your tabletop games. For some games that will save a lot of table space, and saving the table state and coming back to it will be easier.

How much is it?

LOTC has free and paid features.

Free

Importing images, creating cards and decks is free. If you want to carry your decks around with you, or deck build with your cards, this is all you need. You can export and import deck data for free as well.

Paid

The game setup and game playing features require a subscription, which is currently £2.99 / month. There is an example setup to test before subscribing.

Why Does LOTC Exist?

I love playing a certain fantasy card game based on my favourite book.

Set up with LOTR and AH decks

Part of my game setup for LOTR

To be honest, even though my eyesight is not terrible, it's bad enough that I have often found myself taking photographs of my cards to be able to zoom in to read the small writing on them. So I had lots and lots of photos of my cards on my iPad and iPhone which I wanted to organise. I thought it would be great if there was a dedicated app for this, but I couldn't find one so I made my own. And LOTC just grew from there.

Using Lord of the Cards you can create multiple arbitrary decks and assign whichever of your cards you want to them - great for deckbuilding!

You can import and export your card and deck data, so you could share them (although not the pictures) with others.

You can create game setups or virtual tabletops, from card areas, decks, tokens, token pools, counters and dice. Then you can draw cards from the decks and move them to the areas - discard them, exhaust them, move them around, attach other cards to them, remove them completely - all the things you need to do when playing a card game. One of the cool things about this feature is that you can manage multiple games with the same cards... which you can't do 'in real life' - unless you have more than one set of them of course...

You can recreate the play area for your favourite game and effectively play it on your phone or tablet. Or at least manage the cards on it. You can easily leave a game in progress and come back to it. You can duplicate a game to save it at a certain point. LOTC keeps a log of all the actions in each game too for review afterwards perhaps.

I tried to make LOTC flexible enough that it could be used with any card-based games. I've tested it with all the main ones, but of course I use it most for my favourite game.

I have also used LOTC to manage the card, token and counter elements of other tabletop games. There's a famous one which is consistently voted the best game ever (G**ven), but it requires a lot of table space to play. It also involves a lot of little decks of cards which have to be frequently switched and shuffled. LOTC makes that easier and also frees up a lot of table space. Some games have a lot of different components which can be hard to keep track of on the table. I think LOTC offers some relief for that.

Plus of course you can still zoom in on cards and read the small writing ;)

Andrew Markwick, January 2023