# Godot puzzle templates: three of the four are card games

Puzzle is not one genre, it is a shelf. The open-source Godot projects sitting on it are one tile board and three card games, and which one you take decides more about your project than the engine does. Flockbay ships a Grid Puzzle template of its own, free under New from template. Flockbay is free, AI included: free hosted AI every day, or your own Claude, ChatGPT, agent or API key. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, on the official Godot engine.

Source: https://flockbay.com/templates/godot-puzzle-game-template/ · Updated 2026-10-01

## The Grid Puzzle template in Flockbay

A top-down grid puzzler: push crates, hold plates, collect keys and stay ahead of a chasing enemy, in levels you write as text. It is a 3D Godot 4 project in GDScript, open source under the MIT licence, and free like the rest of Flockbay.

Five puzzle levels written as text maps, so a new level is a new grid of characters.

Turn-based or real-time movement, set per level.

Plates, keys and doors on blue, green and red channels, pushable crates, stars to collect and an enemy that hunts you.

A main menu, level select and fade transitions, on flat-shaded shapes that run on the Compatibility renderer.

## Start a game from Grid Puzzle

In the Flockbay app, press New from template on Home, pick Grid Puzzle and press Create. On a first run, answer 3D and then Template, and Continue makes the game. Flockbay downloads the template into a new game folder and opens it in the Godot editor as an ordinary Godot 4 project you own. Tell Flockbay what to change first: it writes a short brief from the template, asks before it builds, and plays each change before you do.

What people usually ask for first: an ice tile you slide across; a sixth level combining a plate, a key and the enemy; a move counter with a par score.

## What is actually out there

Four open-source Godot projects come up when people go looking for a puzzle starter, and three of them are card games. Kenney's Starter Kit Match-3 is the grid one: a 2D board where you swap adjacent tiles. The CCG Engine and Template is a collectible card game with decks and a collection to manage. Veneno is a table card game played against AI opponents. The Card Game Course is a 3D top-down card battler where cards go into lanes.

That imbalance tells you something before you clone anything. Puzzle is not a genre the way a platformer is a genre. It is a bucket holding match-3 boards, card battlers, physics toys, [sokoban grids and logic games](/ai-logic-puzzle-maker/) sharing almost no code. A starter only helps if it is the exact shape of puzzle you are making, and the odds of that are worse here than anywhere else.

## A match-3 starter gets you to the wrong finish line

The swap, match, clear, refill loop is the part people assume is hard, and it is exactly the part a starter hands you. Two tiles trade places, the board looks for a run, the run disappears, the tiles above fall into the gap, and the check runs again on whatever the fall created. It is a satisfying weekend of work, and then it is done.

What is not done is everything that makes somebody play past the fourth board. A match-3 game is [a difficulty curve expressed through level layouts](/ai-match-3-game-maker/): a board shape, a tile set, a goal, a move limit. Games that ship have hundreds of those, tuned by hand, and the tuning is the product. No starter contains them, because they are the design rather than the engineering.

Two smaller problems bite early. A board can refill into a state with no legal move, so you have to detect that and recover gracefully. And feel: a cascade that clears eleven tiles should be the best two seconds in your game, and getting there is [timing, sound, particles and camera movement](/blog/secrets-of-game-feel-and-juice/) tuned against your own reflexes. The mechanics are identical whether it feels good or not.

## Card games: the rules engine is the decision

A card starter is a different kind of object. What you inherit is a rules engine: a game state, turns, a hand, a board, and a way to play a card and have something happen. The three card projects here answer that differently. One is built around deck and collection management, one implements a table game with AI opponents and its own scoring, and one is lane-based combat with health pools.

The choice hidden in that is the one that defines your project. [Every interesting card breaks a rule](/card-game-maker/): it plays out of turn, it copies another card, it changes what winning means. An architecture that survives this treats effects as first-class things that can change the game state and each other. One that does not will handle your first thirty cards beautifully and fight you afterwards, and you cannot swap it once two hundred cards depend on it.

The other honest thing is that code is not the work. Balance is the work, and it is measured in games played rather than lines written. A card set of any size takes hundreds of plays before it stops being obviously broken, and that number does not fall because the engine underneath is good.

## You are adopting somebody else's code

Starting from a project someone else wrote means reading it. Not all of it, but the parts you intend to change, and those are usually the parts the author cared most about and structured most tightly.

That is the whole trade. You swap the weeks it would take to build a working loop for the hours it takes to understand one, plus the risk that their structure and your game want different things. For a tile board that is a small bet. For a card engine you will extend for a year it is a large one. Cheap test: follow what happens between a click and a change on screen. If you cannot trace it, better to learn that on day one than in month four.

## A puzzle game may not want a game engine at all

This is the category where a specialised tool most often beats a starter project, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. A 2D match-3 or logic puzzle needs no 3D, no physics worth the name and no performance headroom. Construct 3 and GDevelop are built for that shape of game and will reach a playable board faster than cloning a Godot project and learning somebody else's conventions. If your puzzle is a browser or phone game with a grid on it, look there first, because delivery is the thing they win on.

That comparison is about the starter, though, not about flat games as a class. A 2D project in Flockbay is not a 3D tool with the depth switched off: the app reads your first message, preselects 2D or 3D from it, and a flat project gets [world tools aimed at flat worlds](/2d-game-maker/) with the same chat behind them.

For a card game the redirect is blunter: [test the rules on paper](/blog/whats-the-point-of-prototyping/). Print them, play twenty games against a friend, and you will know more about whether the game is interesting than any amount of implementation would have told you. Tabletop Simulator does the same job with less cutting out.

Godot earns its place when the puzzle wants what those tools do not do well: a 3D board, a puzzle inside a larger game, or a desktop build you control end to end.

## Where Flockbay fits

Flockbay ships one puzzle template, Grid Puzzle, at the top of this page under New from template on Home, and Open Godot project… opens a Godot project you have downloaded. Its other route is the one below. What it removes is the reason you went looking for a starter: you describe the game, agree a brief on what gets built first, and Flockbay builds the board and writes the GDScript inside your project, so you inherit nobody's architecture and read nobody's code.

Being fair about the fit. It is a desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux, and a new project reads your first message and preselects 2D or 3D from it. A match-3 board or a card table is the 2D answer, which is the same app, the same world tools and the same chat — with a toolbar honestly smaller (Select, Paint, Place, Player controller), because a flat world has fewer things in it than a landscape does. The library leans your way: 55,073 of its 60,648 objects are sprites, and Flockbay sets a card or a board piece at an exact position, rotation and scale. Place, a button around the editor's 2D view, lets you move one yourself.

What applies most here is [the code being written for you](/answers/who-writes-the-code-in-flockbay/), checked by Flockbay playing it, and revised when you say the cascade feels slow — which is the board loop a starter was going to hand you anyway, minus somebody else's architecture. The engine underneath is Godot either way, the game runs locally on the bundled copy, and building needs an internet connection even though playing what you built does not.

## Questions

### Is there an official Godot puzzle template?

No. Godot's own demo projects go in other directions, so this category is all community work on GitHub: Kenney's Starter Kit Match-3 for a tile board, and the CCG Engine and Template, Veneno and the Card Game Course for cards.

### Can I open any of these inside Flockbay?

Not from New from template. Flockbay ships the Grid Puzzle template under New from template on Home. These are public GitHub repositories: clone one, and if it is a Godot 4 project, Open Godot project… opens it in Flockbay, which asks before it adds anything.

### Is a match-3 starter enough to ship a match-3 game?

Not close. The starter gives you the board loop, which is the small half. The game is the level layouts, the curve and the goals on top, hundreds of hand-tuned pieces of design no project can hand over.

### Which card starter should I build on?

Whichever one has effect handling you can read and follow. Every card you write later runs through that code, so architecture matters more than art. Trace one card from click to board change before you commit.

### Should I use Godot for a simple 2D puzzle at all?

Depends where it has to run. If it is a browser or phone game, Construct 3 and GDevelop are built for that delivery and will be faster. If it is a desktop game you own outright, Godot is a fine home for it — and a flat project in Flockbay is picked at creation rather than being a 3D tool with the depth switched off. For a card game, play the rules on paper or in Tabletop Simulator before implementing anything.

Download Flockbay free: Flockbay is a free download for Windows, macOS and Linux. It ships the Grid Puzzle template, and it builds the game from a brief you approve, and you judge it. https://flockbay.com/

Related: [Godot 2D game templates](/templates/godot-2d-game-template/), [Godot visual novel templates](/templates/godot-visual-novel-template/), [Godot city builder templates](/templates/godot-city-builder-template/), [Godot RPG templates](/templates/godot-rpg-template/)