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; `count` is how many copies exist.

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, 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 draw-pile zone holding cards, plus a group of cards that share one back image. Author and group cards in the Settings → Decks tab.

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.

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 can gate which zones stay visible afterward.

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.

Procedures are compound multi-step actions. Generated games never emit them and you should not author one — the taybl-native answer is zones plus rules text. The schema keeps them only for a few legacy hand-authored games.

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.