Handling pieces & cards

Every physical thing on the table — a card, a piece, a die, a token — responds to the same handful of gestures. Because taybl never enforces rules, these are just manipulations: you decide when each is legal. The one exception is a sheet, which you write on rather than pick up — it has its own section below.

The core gestures

On an open surface where pieces overlap, drag reorders them naturally; the menu’s Bring to front / Send to back (and the ] / [ keys) set the stacking order explicitly.

Picking something up

A drag lifts the component off the table: it leaves the spot it was in and follows your cursor at full size, with whatever it was carrying — counters pinned to it, a card tucked underneath, its counter value, its tint.

It hangs from the exact point you grabbed, the way a real card would. So nudging something a few millimetres moves it a few millimetres, and because the space it came from is empty while you hold it, you can drop it back onto the thing that was underneath it — or right where it started.

Moving without dragging

You do not have to drag. Click a component once and it lifts — it stays where it is, but a pulsing amber outline appears around it, and the table is now waiting for you to say where. Click where you want it and it goes there.

On a touch screen this is on already. With a mouse it is off, because a mouse already drags comfortably, and a click that also means pick this up moved pieces people only meant to look at. You can have it either way: under Account & profile → Click to move, choose Always on to use it with a mouse too, or Off to turn it off everywhere. Auto, the default, is the split described above.

As you move the cursor, the space under it lights up — the exact board cell on a board that has cells, the whole space on one that does not. It is the same highlight a drag shows, and it means this is where it would land.

It lands at the point you clicked, exactly as if you had dropped it there — the same board cell, the same node on a map, the same spot on an open play area. (And as with a drop, spaces that arrange their own contents — a hand, a deck, a discard pile — tidy the component into place rather than leaving it exactly where your cursor was. See zone arrangement.)

Anything you can drag, you can move this way, and a whole selected group moves together just the same. The one exception is a die: clicking a die already means roll it, so dice are moved by dragging them.

To put it down without moving it, press Escape, right-click it, or click a patch of bare felt that is not a zone. Clicking a panel in the drawer, the table menu, or anything else off the table leaves it held, so you can look something up mid-move.

This is the easiest way to play on a phone or tablet, where dragging across a zoomed table is fiddly — and the only way to move something if holding a button down while moving a pointer is difficult for you. That is why it is on by default for touch, and why Always on exists for anyone who needs it with a mouse.

The mid-drag choices below — Alt to tuck, Tab to pick a landing rule, f and e to change a component in the air — belong to dragging, and need a keyboard. A click-placed component takes the space’s ordinary landing rule. To flip a card before you move it this way, flip it first (click-free: press f with the cursor over it, double-click it, or use the right-click menu), then click to move it.

Turning something over

Double-click a component and it flips: a card shows its other face, a token turns over, a die goes to its opposite face. It is the same action as Flip in the right-click menu and the f key — just the quickest way to reach it, and the one that needs no keyboard.

Because a single click already means pick this up (above), the two gestures have to share. They divide by where the second click lands: click a component and then click somewhere else, and it moves there as it always did; click the same spot twice, quickly, and it flips instead. Moving something is never slowed down waiting to find out — the table only treats it as a flip if the second click is right on top of the first.

A die is the one component where both halves do something. Its first click rolls, as it always has, so a double-click rolls it and then turns it onto the opposite face. If you only meant to roll, click once.

Double-clicking inside a selected group turns over only the component you clicked, not the whole selection.

Careful with a face-down deck: the top card of a pile is a component like any other, so double-clicking it turns it face-up for everyone. That is often exactly what you want — flipping the top of the draw pile — but it is not private. Use Peek from the right-click menu to look without showing.

Tucking one thing under another

Some games slide a card underneath another one so only an edge shows — a scoring multiplier peeking out from under a tableau card, a wonder stage under a wonder board, a card installed under another.

Hold Alt (Option on a Mac) while dragging one component onto another, and it tucks under instead of landing on top. While you hold it, a preview of the tuck appears under the target so you can see exactly what you are about to get, and the drag ghost names the mode you are in. Press Tab mid-drag to cycle between placing, tucking under, and attaching on top; release Alt to go back to a plain drop.

What counts is where the component is, not where the pointer is. Lay the card you are carrying over the one it should go under — grabbing it by a corner is fine — and how far you leave it hanging over the edge is how much of it stays showing once it is tucked.

Choosing how it lands

Some spaces come with landing rules — the designer has said how the second thing dropped there differs from the first, so a card lands face up and the next one tucks in sideways behind it. Normally the table works out which rule applies from what is already in the space, and you never think about it.

When you want the other one, Tab through them. Over a space with landing rules the cycle picks up an extra stop per rule, before the tuck and attach modes: press Tab and the ghost names the rule you are on — City, if the designer named it, or Drop 2 if not — and the drop takes that rule instead of the one the table would have chosen. Tab past the last one to go back to letting the table decide.

This is a drag-only choice. A card that arrives by being dealt, drawn or collected always takes the rule the space works out for itself.

You never need the modifier for an ordinary drop. It exists because dropping a card onto an occupied space and tucking it underneath happen at the same pixel — so you say which one you mean.

A tucked component travels with its host: move the card it is under and it goes along, and it is captured or removed together with it. To take it back out — or just to move the bottom card — drag its exposed edge away; it lights up on hover to show it is grabbable. Drop it on another edge of the same component to re-tuck it there instead. When only a sliver is showing, Un-tuck in its right-click menu is the easier route.

You can also tuck without dragging at all: right-click the component and pick Tuck under…, naming the thing it should go beneath. On a board that lists the things sharing the space you clicked; in an open play area, where nothing shares a space, it lists what else is lying in the area.

Changing a component in mid-air

While you are dragging something, the object hotkeys act on what you are carrying, not on whatever is under the cursor. So you can pick a card up, press f to flip it and e to rotate it, and only then let go — the drag preview updates as you do, so you always see what you are about to place.

(Re-ordering keys are the exception: [ and ] do nothing mid-drag, because a component in the air has no place among its neighbours yet.)

Knowing what a drop will do

Dropping a component into a zone can turn it over — a face-down card dropped into a face-up play area arrives face-up, visible to everyone. That is what the zone is for, but it is easy to do by accident and impossible to take back.

So while you drag, the table warns you in amber — Will flip face up — the moment the drop under your cursor would turn the component over. If that is not what you wanted, drop it somewhere else, flip it first with f, or tuck it under something (a tuck never changes which way up a component is).

The same warning follows your cursor while you are holding something you clicked rather than dragged, so a click-move can never turn a card over without telling you first.

The thing following your cursor keeps showing the component exactly as you are holding it. A face-down card stays face-down in your hand no matter what it is passing over, so carrying one across a face-up zone on the way somewhere else never shows you its face — the amber caption is the whole warning. (The one thing that does change it is you: press f in mid-air and it turns over.)

A tucked card that is face-up is public, even though only a strip of it is visible — flip it face-down first if it is meant to be a secret.

Rolling dice

Dice work the way they do on a real table: pick them up and put them back down in the same place, and they roll. Concretely — press a die and release it over the zone it came from and it rolls. Release it over a different zone and nothing rolls; it just moves there, like any other component. A plain click is the same gesture with no travel — so a click rolls, and what it rolls depends on the zone.

That is why a die is the one thing a click does not pick up for a Moving without dragging placement: its click already means roll. Drag a die to move it.

How many dice roll depends on what else is in the zone:

Clicking a single die in a dice-only tray does not roll only that die — it rolls the whole tray. Splitting the tray into one zone per die is not needed to roll one at a time: use right-click Roll on the die, the R hotkey over it, or Roll on its row in the zone inspector.

Dice sitting loose on a board behave the same, with one difference you would expect: dragging one to a new spot on the board still repositions it. Only a release back where it started counts as a roll.

A spinner is a die with its own click-to-spin wheel, so it keeps that gesture and is left out of tray rolls — a zone holding a spinner is never treated as a "dice tray".

The right-click menu keeps every roll as well: Roll on a single die, and on the zone itself Roll all or Roll N when you want just three of the five. Hovering a die and pressing R rolls it too.

Setting a die without rolling it

When a rule lets you change a die rather than re-roll it, you can put a die on any face by hand. Right-click one for Flip to opposite face (7 − n, the way turning a physical die over works), Value +1 / Value −1, and a Set to N entry per face — or Set value…, which opens a grid, on a die with more than eight faces. F flips the die under the cursor and = / − step it, stopping at the die’s highest and lowest faces rather than wrapping around.

Setting a die is logged like any other action, so the table can see it, and the die does not tumble — only a real roll animates. Full detail on the Dice page.

The right-click verb menu

Right-clicking a component builds a menu from what that component is and where it sits. A few lead the menu; the rest tuck behind a More… disclosure so the common actions stay short. Not every verb shows on every component — the menu only lists what applies:

Designers can curate which of these a particular zone offers, so a tightly themed game may show a shorter list on purpose. The same verbs are reachable from the keyboard while hovering a component — F flip (over a die, onto its opposite face), E rotate, R roll, Z peek, T tap, L lock, C duplicate, = / − to nudge the first counter (over a die, its face, clamped to the die’s ends) — all rebindable in Account → Keyboard shortcuts.

The inspect / enlarge overlay

To read fine print, use Inspect from the menu (or hold V over the component). This opens a large, centred view of the component — purely a closer look, with no change to the table and nothing broadcast to other players. For a composed card — one taybl draws from fields rather than an uploaded image — the enlarged view shows the whole face with its full rules body, so peeking or inspecting is how you read text the small on-table card can’t fit (the overlay scrolls when the body runs long). It respects hidden faces: a card you aren’t allowed to see stays a generic back even when enlarged. Close it with Escape or a click away.

Filling in a sheet

A sheet is the one component you write on instead of moving — a score card, a character sheet, a Clue notepad. Click the pad and it opens large over the felt, at a size where the cells are comfortable to type in: a pad drawn at its true physical size has cells only a few pixels tall, so this — not zooming the whole table — is how you fill one in. Escape, the ×, or a click on the dimmed felt puts it back down, saving whatever you had half-typed. Two conveniences either side of that: a face-down pad opens to a Turn face-up button rather than a blank sheet of paper, and the table menu’s Sheets row (table tools) lists every pad you can read — for when the paper is awkward to click, and for the many pads that live in that list instead of on the felt at all.

Inside the pad, click a cell and type. The control matches the field the designer declared for it:

What you type is saved a moment after you stop (or as soon as you click away or press Enter), so a burst of typing is one save rather than one per keystroke. Clearing a cell empties it rather than setting it to zero — "not scored yet" and "scored zero" are different things on a score pad, and the pad keeps the difference. Every copy of a sheet holds its own values, so a per-player pad tracks each player separately.

taybl never adds a sheet up. A Total row is a cell you fill in, exactly as on paper — the table holds the pad, you do the arithmetic. Dragging the paper (not a cell) moves the pad like any other component — a press that travels moves it, a click opens it — and who can read a filled-in pad is decided by the zone it sits in, see zone visibility. A pad flips too, like anything but a die, and a face-down pad keeps its writing hidden.

A note on components inside a zone

A component sitting inside a deck, a pile, or a hand is handled through that container’s inspector rather than a floating menu — right-clicking there opens the container inspector, whose per-row drawers carry these same verbs.

In an open play area — a zone whose arrangement is free or scatter, including the bare felt when open play is on — that inspector narrows to what you clicked: right-click a particular component and the popup lists just that one, a single row with its own verbs and its … drawer, rather than every loose component in the area. For the full list, use Show all N at the foot of that popup, or right-click empty space inside a play-area zone.

Related

• Decks, draws & bags — acting on piles and containers
• Moving around the table — camera, select, magnify
• Component rendering — faces, stats, and states
• Sheets — the pad you write on, and how it is authored
• Your hand & private zones — where private components live