How would I recreate a card game into Vassal?

Hello!

I have a forgotten real-life TCG in my hands right now, whose cards and playboard are very difficult to find, so I decided to upload it to Tabletop Simulator. Although the game works fine in Tabletop, the Simulator is paid and so not everyone of the TCG’s community has access to it. So my plan would be to put it into Vassal, a free software.

I have all the PNGs necessary, all the cards and the playboard. But is it as easy to upload them to Vassal and play the game? Or is code strictly necessary. I don’t exactly need all the rules into code, players can inforce them themselves.

Basically, I’m just asking if I can just upload the images and play the game, without any coding whatsoever. Is that possible?

If you want to accomplish a bare minimum of functionality, you shouldn’t need anything that would be considered coding. You can use the Mass Upload functionality to bring all your card images into a piece palette and assign them names. A prototype could be assigned to them all that gives the ability to flip them over back and forth. Create a map window with a single board containing your playboard image, then probably a pair of player hand windows. Depending on the rules of your game, there might be further requirements that add some mild complexity–e.g., rotating cards, tucking cards under others, and so on.

Even accomplishing just these minimum requirements, it’s a reasonable expectation that it will take longer than TTS to get to feature parity.

Could you clarify what the last paragraph you wrote is about? What are “TTS” and “feature parity”? Thank you for the response either way.

TTS = Tabletop Simulator

Although I haven’t done any TTS module creation, my acquired knowledge of the process leads me to the following conclusion:

To get to the point of having equal basic functionality in both TTS and VASSAL (for example, a playing surface, all the cards, ability to flip cards over, whatever you understand to be minimum requirements), it will probably take more time to reach that goal in VASSAL than it will in TTS.

Oh, okay.
I’m trying to manage my way around Vassal, but it is pretty much unknown territory to me. I initially just thought I would load the engine press two buttons and load up all the PNGs, oh well.
Thank you for your response!

Vassal was not originally written with card games in mind, so some ‘card gamey’ things are hard to implement. There are other TCG modules for Vassal, you may want to poke around in the guts of one of those to get some ideas.