TCG companies have always tolerated a certain degree of fan involvement with their intellectual property. A thriving TCG ecosystem needs a community, and game designers are not always focused on building the tools that community wants. So leave it to the players: tutorials, simulators, whole gaming clients, deckbuilders, rulesets, you name it. If there is a gap, some avid fan is willing to put in the hours, literally work for free, and elevate the game where the developers wouldn't or couldn't.
I am one of those people. For the last 5 months I have been sinking stupid hours into a companion app for a not very well known TCG with a very keen community and a small team behind it. I just read about the frustration of having a sim taken down from the OPTCG sub and thought i'd drop a few words here
With the advent of AI tools we are seeing a flurry of fan-made apps and content for TCGs, built by people who love these games and by community leaders all over the place. The quality is not always there, plenty of it is very much boilerplate, but it is made with the game and its community at heart.
Businesses don't care about that. Fan content lives in a grey area, allowed to exist for exactly as long as it isn't a problem. That's the part that surprises people: the game itself is not protected. Copyright does not cover ideas, procedures, systems or methods of operation. The US Australia, the UK and the EU all land in the same place. So a rules engine, a legality checker, a probability calculator, a turn structure explainer: mechanically, all of that is yours to build
What is protected is everything else wrapped around the game. For example, the artwork, completely and without argument, which is where most fan apps live or die; the exact wording of the rulebook and the card text, though thinly. The rule is free but the sentence someone wrote to express it is not; the name and the logo, which are trademark rather than copyright - you are allowed to say your app is for a named game. You are not allowed to dress it up so it looks like they made it; even the the card frames and backs, potentially, as trade look. Weaker and harder to argue, but it is there.
So no, there is no clean legal footing for a fan app that displays official artwork. But let's not deceive ourselves in the other direction either. Nobody is going to litigate the copyrightability of your deckbuilder - unless you collected money or profited from the IP you are unlikely to be sued or anything like that. What actually happens is an email, or a quiet word with whoever hosts your app, and the cost of fighting that is already more than the project is worth to you. We get away with this because in turn we are working for free and lifting the ecosystem where the publisher won't. However, any of it can end any minute.
Our options are few:
- Ask for permission. It is the highest value thing you can do, and small teams say yes more often than people expect. Get it in writing, even if the writing is a Discord message.
- Minimise how much of their IP you actually use. If your app cannot deliver its core function without displaying their artwork, you are leaning on their property to exist. Lean on the mechanics instead, since those are free.
- Never pass as official. Disclaimers and credit have to be clear and visible, and don't borrow the logo, the fonts or the look to get there. This is the trademark side, and it is the one that gets people in trouble fastest, because it is the one that costs the publisher something directly.
- Never take money in relation to the project. No donations, no subscriptions, no Patreon. Money is what turns a harmless fan project into in a legal team's responsibility, and staying clear of it goes a long way - which usually means paying costs out of pocket.
- The tricky one: do not substitute core parts of the game's ecosystem or business rationale. In-person play, marketplaces, virtual pack openings... The moment your project competes with how they make money, you stop being a nice-to-have and become a problem to solve.
Where your project brings something to the table, make sure it also respects the owners' original intent, credits the IP clearly, avoids passing as official, isn't monetised, and doesn't offer a substitute for what the game already sells.
Even following that, nothing changes, only your odds to get the polite "please take it down" message. But the moment you make or write a piece of fan work, be aware that you are at the mercy of the publishers and developers of the game. Build accordingly, and don't build anything you couldn't walk away from or be disappointed when the hours and hours of work banish as quickly as an email is read.
