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Card Hand Toolkit

A Unity toolkit for the shared building blocks of card games. Card Hand Toolkit gives your Unity card game polished hand layouts, responsive hover and drag interactions, and flexible card visuals. Start with the included sample and Setup Wizard, then adapt the toolkit to your own game.

What it handles

The behavior card games share: the hand, hover, drag, playing cards into zones, card data and card visuals.

Captioned "Polished card interactions": the mouse pointer hovers the centre card of a fanned hand, which lifts and grows above its neighbours.

Polished hand and hover

Cards fan out along a curve you shape in the Inspector. Hovered cards lift, scale and come forward, and cards outside the hand open a larger preview. Players can click or tap to raise the hand and drag cards to reorder them.

Captioned "Interactions tailored to mouse and touch": the same hand on a desktop monitor with mouse hover, and on a phone with a touch long-press preview.

Made for mouse and touch

Mouse hover and touch long-press each have their own timings, so the hand feels right on desktop, iOS and Android. It works with the Legacy Input Manager or the Input System.

Captioned "Playable sample game included": the sample scene, with labels for the opponent hand, played cards, win rows, player hand, discard pile and draw pile.

Drag cards into play

Drag a card above the hand to play it into the first zone that accepts it. Row and single-slot zones are included, with an interface for your own. Global, per-zone and per-card rules decide whether each card can be hovered, dragged, selected or targeted.

The included sample scene is a complete, playable card game built with the toolkit.

Captioned "Your card data. Your presentation.": a card with the core fields, the same layout showing custom Cost and Suit add-ons, and the Unity Inspector where that data is edited.

Your card data, your presentation

Cards are assets with a title, rules text, art and frame. Add your own game-specific data, such as cost or suit, and choose how it's shown with your own card layouts, frames, art and text.

Captioned "Setup workflow": the Card Hand Toolkit Setup Wizard choosing what to place in a new Game scene, next to the resulting scene layout and its objects in the Hierarchy.

Guided setup

The Setup Wizard creates your own copies of the toolkit's assets and sets up a playable Game scene. The Quick Start then walks you through drawing cards, showing your own data and playing cards into zones.

The sample card illustrations, card back and game background were generated with AI, and the card illustrations were then substantially edited by hand. See the license for details.

Built for many kinds of card games

Card Hand Toolkit is designed for deckbuilders, traditional card games and other games built around a hand of cards.

It handles how cards look and how players interact with them. Your game's rules, card effects and opponents stay in your own code.

Requirements

Unity
2023.1 or newer, including Unity 6
Render pipelines
Built-in and Universal Render Pipeline (URP)
Platforms
Desktop, iOS and Android
Input
Legacy Input Manager or Input System
Includes
Setup Wizard, sample scene, documentation and C# source

Documentation and support

Start with the Quick Start, then use the API Reference for each part of the toolkit. For questions and issue reports, join the Discord server.

  • Quick StartInstall, run the Setup Wizard, and get cards drawing, showing data and playing.
  • API ReferenceConcepts, modules and every public type.
  • FAQCommon questions and troubleshooting.
  • Demo videoSee the toolkit in action.
  • Tutorial videoRecreate the included sample game from a fresh Unity project.
  • DiscordQuestions, feedback and support.
  • ChangelogWhat's in each version.