Designer documentation

taybl models a physical table, not a rules engine. Designers arrange components and zones; players resolve the rules themselves.

The Studio is where you build a game. Five tabs — Preview, Details, Layout, Settings, Publish — cover everything from playtesting the table to shipping it.

Drop your rulebook, component art, card faces, and reference photos into the upload buckets; the AI reads them and generates a first-draft table you then refine.

Components are the physical object types on the table — pieces, cards, dice, and tokens. One entry is one type; it is an infinite template, and copies come from setup placements and deck membership.

A piece is a physical figure — a meeple, mini, pawn, or marker. It can carry movement hints (UX-only) and a non-rectangular shape, but taybl never enforces how it moves.

A card is a component that flips between a front and a shared back. It can belong to a deck `group`, and a big unique deck can be authored compactly with `variants`.

A die is a randomiser with two or more faces. Each face has a `value` and an optional art binding; taybl rolls it but never interprets the result.

A token is a small generic component — a chip, cube, coin, or counter. `isResource` hints that it’s a tradeable resource; a `valueBinding` turns it into a live counter.

The optional refinements every component kind shares — a non-rectangular `shape`, a multi-cell `footprint`, drag `behaviors`, attachable markers, and a live `valueBinding` number.

A zone is a meaningful region that holds components — a draw pile, a hand, a board. It carries meaning and behaviour, but never a position; that lives in the layout.

A zone’s role is its semantic purpose — draw pile, hand, discard, play area, and so on. It drives the right-click menu and a few sensible defaults.

Scope decides whether a zone exists once at the table (shared) or once per seated player (perSeat) — the difference between a communal discard and each player’s own hand.

Arrangement is how a zone lays its contents out physically — a neat stack, a fanned hand, a grid of cells, a loose scatter, an open freeform surface, or a single slot.

Visibility decides who can see a zone’s contents — public, owner-only, or everyone-except-owner. It is the one thing taybl truly enforces: hidden contents are redacted server-side.

A grid turns a zone into a structured board — a chessboard, a hex map, a point-to-point network, or an open tile lattice. It pairs with role grid and arrangement grid.

A deck is a component-group of cards that share one back image. A component-group is a named set of components (any kind) with a shared back and a per-member quantity, placeable into a zone as a unit. Build them in the Component Groups panel.

Layout is where every zone physically sits on the table, and where the seats are. It is kept separate from zone definitions so your placements survive regeneration.

Seats are the player positions around the table. Each has an index and an angle, where 0 is the far edge and 180 is the near edge. seatLocal zones rotate to each seat.

The Studio’s Layout tab is a canvas editor with two modes — Arrange (geometry) and Setup (the opening sequence) — a left browser, a right inspector, and a header toolbar for mode, phases, undo/redo, reset, and save.

Drag to move, corner handles to resize, and a handle to rotate; edges snap with alignment guides (hold Alt to disable). Marquee-select, then align, distribute, match, group, lock, duplicate, delete, or nudge.

The right-hand inspector changes with your selection: a zone, a component (with faces and a convert-kind control), a component group (a deck), a grid or graph board, the table, or a setup step.

Setup mode shows the opening as one timeline — the board-build placements first, then your authored steps — on a reorderable rail. Select an item to preview and edit it; a switcher previews each setup option.

Setup placements describe what is on the table when the game begins — which components start in which zones, how many, face up or down, and for which seats.

One ordered list of typed setup steps — variant, identity, pool, draft, and auto — is the authored source of truth for everything players (and the table) decide before the first turn.

Setup automation is the short sequence of steps that runs once at game start — shuffle a deck, deal opening hands, set starting properties — plus the options players pick before play begins.

Phases are an optional ordered list of staged layouts — they swap which zones are visible and where they sit as the game moves through steps like drafting or a scenario reveal. They are layout, not turn enforcement.

A selection is a click-to-pick interaction inside a phase — players choose some zones or components from a pool, and the picks drive setup distribution of components into supply zones.

A grant is the identity-assignment escape hatch on a component selection — picking a component can confer ownership and placement of it (and its property-matched siblings) onto the player who picked it.

The reference block is the plain-language rules text players read in the sidebar. It has no mechanical effect — on taybl, “resolving a rule” means a human reads it and acts.

Generation gives you a first draft. Refine it by describing changes in plain language and letting the AI revise, and keep an older game current with the one-click Update path.

Fill in the storefront on the Details tab — title, description, photos, links — then ship the game from the Publish tab to a public Game Home at its own URL. You can keep editing afterward.

The play surface at a glance — the felt, the right-edge rail, and the edge trays. taybl is a table, not a rules engine: you resolve every rule by hand with drag and the rules sidebar.

Zoom, pan, and fit the table to the screen; rotate the whole view 90°; rubber-band a group of components with Shift-drag; and hold a key to magnify or enlarge whatever is under the cursor.

Drag to move, click to flip, and right-click for the verb menu — flip, rotate, roll, peek, tap, lock, inspect, duplicate, adjust a counter, tint, and remove. Plus the enlarge overlay for reading a card.

Draw the top card by dragging it (or press D); deal one to every seat; shuffle by shaking a deck mid-drag. Bags draw a random item. The container inspector lets you peek, reveal, reorder, and search a pile.

The bottom hand tray holds your private cards — it slides up on hover and pins open when locked. Others see only backs and counts. The right-edge supply tray holds shared pools everyone draws from.

End turn advances a shared marker (taybl never forces it); Undo reverts the last action. The history panel logs every move and lets you rewind to an earlier point. Hot-seat mode hides the table between passes.