Card Wars AR

Adventure Time Card Wars reimagined as a physical AR tabletop game. Place NFC-tagged cards on a Tilt Five retroreflective board and watch 3D creatures appear above the table, fight, and die in augmented reality.

Two-player. Local. Physical cards. Real combat.

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Hardware Required

Item	Purpose
Tilt Five AR Glasses	AR display — you need one set per player
ACR122U USB NFC Reader	Reads the physical cards
NTAG215 NFC cards	The physical cards (same chip as Amiibo)
Windows PC	Runs the game

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Installation

Download CardWarsAR_Setup.exe and run it. It installs:

• CardWars.exe — the Unity game
• nfc-bridge.exe — NFC reader process (no Python required)
• LaunchCardWars.bat — starts both together
• A desktop shortcut

Double-click the shortcut or run LaunchCardWars.bat to start. The launcher starts the NFC bridge first, waits 2 seconds, then launches the game.

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Playing

Deck Selection

Both players pick a hero deck using the wand joystick (left/right to cycle, trigger to confirm). Player 1 picks first, then Player 2. First turn is random.

Taking a Turn

• Tap an NFC card to the reader to scan a creature into your hand
• Joystick to select a lane, trigger to place the creature
• B button to end your action phase and enter combat
• Creatures in lanes automatically fight the creature in the opposing lane

Controls

Input	Action
Joystick left/right	Select lane
Trigger	Place card / confirm action
B button	Confirm turn / enter combat
Y button	Enter floop mode
X button	Draw extra card (costs 1 action)
A button	Activate ability mode

Lane Types

Each hero has 4 lanes of specific terrain types. Creatures can only be placed on their matching landscape.

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Setting Up NFC Cards

Open nfc-bridge/uid_map.json and map each physical tag's UID to a card ID:

{
  "04:A1:B2:C3:D4:E5:F6": "cornataur",
  "04:11:22:33:44:55:66": "ancient_scholar"
}

Tap a card to the ACR122U while nfc-bridge.exe is running — the UID will print to its console window. Card IDs match the id field in cards.json.

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Building from Source

Requirements:

• Unity 6
• Python 3.11+ (for NFC bridge development)
• Inno Setup (to rebuild the installer)
• Tilt Five Unity SDK (install via Package Manager → Add from git URL)

# NFC bridge dev mode
cd nfc-bridge
pip install -r requirements.txt
python reader.py

# Build NFC bridge to exe
build_bridge.bat

# Rebuild installer (after new Unity build)
# Open installer/CardWarsAR.iss in Inno Setup Compiler → Build

Unity build output goes to Build/. The installer packages Build/ + nfc-bridge/dist/nfc-bridge.exe.

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Project Structure

/Build              — compiled game (run CardWars.exe directly)
/CardWars           — Unity project
  /Assets/Scripts
    /Game           — card logic, combat, game state
    /NFC            — WebSocket listener, card event dispatcher
    /TiltFive       — board setup, creature spawner, wand input
/installer          — Inno Setup script → CardWarsAR_Setup.exe
/nfc-bridge         — Python NFC reader + PyInstaller build
  reader.py         — reads ACR122U, sends card events over WebSocket
  uid_map.json      — maps NFC tag UIDs to card IDs
LaunchCardWars.bat  — starts bridge + game together

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Stack

• Unity 6 + Tilt Five SDK — AR rendering
• C# — all game logic
• Python 3 + PyInstaller — NFC bridge (ships as a standalone exe)
• ACR122U — USB NFC reader
• WebSocket (localhost:8765) — bridge between NFC reader and Unity
• MixCast — mixed reality capture

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Status

Prototype. Two-player local play is working. NFC card scanning, 3D creature rendering, full combat resolution, and AR display via Tilt Five are all functional.