So, I got this idea buzzing around my head a while back to try and build a little tarot card calculator. Not like those fancy websites, you know? Just something simple for myself, mostly because I was curious if I could actually make a computer “deal” cards.
Getting Started
First thing I did was just sketch out what it needed to do. I decided right away to keep it really basic. No complicated spreads or deep interpretations. My main goal was just this: push a button, get a few random cards, and maybe see a keyword or two about them. Simple as that. Didn’t want to bite off more than I could chew.
Gathering the Goods
Okay, next up, I needed the actual card info. This meant listing out all 78 tarot cards. You got your Major Arcana, like The Fool and The Magician, and then all the Minor Arcana – Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles. I spent a bit of time just typing these names into a plain list on my computer. Then, I looked up some really basic, like one or two-word, meanings for each card. Just enough to give a hint. Didn’t want paragraphs, just keywords.
The “Calculator” Part
Making it actually do something was the next step. How do you make a computer shuffle and pick cards randomly? I had to figure that out. I found some simple code snippets, nothing too complex, just basic commands that could take my list of 78 cards and randomly pull out, say, three of them. The key was making it random, so it felt a bit like shuffling a real deck.
Putting it On Screen
I didn’t just want code running in the background; I wanted to see the result. So, I cobbled together a super simple display. Honestly, it was just a plain page with a button. You click the button labelled something like “Draw Cards”, and boom, the names of the three random cards it picked would appear below it, along with those keywords I found earlier. I used some really basic webpage building blocks for this part.
Testing and Fixing Things
Naturally, it wasn’t perfect right off the bat. First few tries, I ran into some snags. I remember one time it kept showing the same card two or three times in one draw, which shouldn’t happen. So, I had to dive back into the random picking logic. Spent some time tweaking that code to make sure it always gave three different cards each time. It took a bit of back-and-forth to get it working smoothly.
What Came Out of It
So, what I ended up with is this straightforward little tool. Click, see three cards, see their keywords. It’s definitely not a replacement for a real tarot reading or anything serious. It’s more like a little digital toy I made. But you know what? It was pretty satisfying to start with just an idea and end up with something that actually works, even if it’s simple. It was a good exercise in just figuring things out step-by-step.
