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CHESS SMACKDOWN ~ Single-Sourcing a Card Game With MadCap Flare

Where the Idea came From

Chess Smackdown started at my neighbor's kitchen table. Their two sons, 15 and 12, and I wanted to make chess less predictable. We landed on resolving captures with a card battle instead of a straight piece-value swap: three cards face down, one face up, higher card wins. Add Jokers (a. k. a. Snipers) for bonus effects. Drop check and checkmate. The result plays fast and stays tense until the last king falls.

Chess Smackdown board and cards    Sniper card

I wrote the rules down so we wouldn't forget them. Then I saw a second use: original content, no employer IP, good size for a first Flare project.

Why This Project

I'd never used MadCap Flare. I had a 30-day trial and a self-imposed deadline, so I needed real content to import, not a placeholder. The rulebook fit: enough sections for a TOC and cross-references, small enough to finish in a few evenings.

The project covered:

  • Importing a Word draft as the source
  • Organizing topics and building a table of contents
  • Building HTML5 and PDF targets from one source
  • Publishing the HTML5 output to GitHub Pages

One source, two outputs, no retyping. That's the single-sourcing pitch, and building it once made it concrete.

A Disclaimer on the Output

The published HTML5 topics have random garbled characters. That's a limitation of Flare's 30-day trial, not a typo. I chose to publish as-is rather than wait for a license I don't currently have budget for. The DOCX version of the rulebook is clean if you want to read the actual writing.

What's Next

Two things I'd add with more time:

  • A second audience view using conditional content
  • MadCap Central for publishing instead of a manual Git push

For now, this got me through Flare's project structure and one real single-sourcing pass, start to finish.