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
| Gesture | What it does |
|---|---|
| Drag | Move the component to wherever you drop it — another zone, a board cell, an open play area, your hand |
| Click a card | Flip it face-up / face-down |
| Click a sheet | Open the pad large and writable, over the felt — see below |
| Right-click (or long-press) | Open the context menu of verbs for that component |
| Drop a marker onto a piece | Attach the small token to that piece so they move together (drag it away to detach) |
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.
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:
| Verb | Appears on | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Flip | Cards, pieces, tokens, and sheets — everything but a die | Turn it face-up / face-down |
| Rotate | Rotatable components | Turn it 90° (or to the next allowed angle) |
| Roll | Dice | Reroll to a random face |
| Peek | A face-down component | Privately look at its hidden face |
| Tap / Untap | Cards and pieces | Exhaust or ready it (a 90° tap) |
| Lock / Unlock | Anything | Pin it so it can’t be dragged by accident |
| Inspect | Cards and pieces | Enlarge it in an overlay to read it (see below) |
| Open | Sheets | The same verb as Inspect, renamed: a pad opens large and writable, because enlarging a score card is about filling it in |
| Duplicate | Anything | Drop a copy on the table |
| Claim | Anything | Mark it as yours |
| Select / Deselect | Cards and tokens | Add it to a batch for a zone-level move |
| Counter ±step | Components with a numeric stat | Nudge that stat up or down |
| Add stat… | Anything (un-curated menus) | Pin an ad-hoc counter like crit: 2 onto this one piece |
| Switch state | Multi-state components | Cycle to the next authored state |
| Tint | Anything | Mark it with a colour (teams, ownership); clear it again |
| Move to… / Give to… | Cards | Send it to a named zone, or into another player’s hand |
| Remove from table | Anything | Take it off the table for this session (setup re-places it next time) |
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 (any component but a die), E rotate, R roll, Z peek, T tap, L lock, C duplicate, = / − to nudge the first counter — 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 felt toolbar’s Sheets button (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:
| Cell type | How you fill it |
|---|---|
| Number | Type the number. When the row is tall enough, − and + buttons flank the cell for nudging it a step at a time |
| Text | Type freely — a name, an initial, a note to yourself |
| Checkbox | Click to tick and click again to clear |
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 stacked contents
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. Loose components out on the felt use the pop-up menu above.
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