Card games!

[Jack Thompson]

I'm an aspiring game developer (a senior in high school) hopefully going to a college with a prestigous game program (Michigan State University) and I'm beginning work on my first game. I've already attended a game design camp (at MSU) and I'm fluent in C++. I'm going to make a 16-bit card game, but I want it to be fully featured. I just really like retro graphics. I need some help on some basic things. The first and most important, is how do you get the game to recognize each specific card? One idea I had was a properties tag system that would let the game (and the AI) recognize what the card does/how to counteract it by the tags that are on the card. I know eventually you have to feed all the cards into the array, or else it's obviously not going to grasp what card it is. The other one is the deck assembly screen. I have no idea how to set up a GUI like that to let you do specific things. Is it an array that shows you all the cards you have?

I'm not really expecting any feedback, but some would be great. The engine that I'm using is ClanLib, as it's free and open source and is generally optimized for 2D graphics. I have no other programming knowledge other than VB and C++, so it was an obvious choice.

Thanks a lot!