What taybl is

taybl is a virtual tabletop. A game on taybl is a ready-to-play table — a felt surface with components laid out on it, seats around the edge, and a rules reference players can open. It is not a rules engine: taybl does not enforce turns, score, or legality. Players move, flip, and deal things by hand, exactly as they would at a real table, and resolve every rule themselves using the rules sidebar.

Keeping this mental model in mind explains almost every design choice below. When you are unsure how to model something, ask "how would this work on a real table?" rather than "how would a program enforce this?".

The building blocks

A game definition is made of a handful of concepts. Each has its own page in these docs:

• Components — the physical things on the table: cards, pieces, dice, and tokens.
• Zones — meaningful regions that hold components: a draw pile, a hand, a discard, a board, a play area. Zones carry meaning and behaviour (who can see them, how contents arrange), but not position.
• Layout — where each zone physically sits on the table, and where the seats are.
• Setup — what is on the table when the game begins, plus optional shuffle/deal automation.
• Phases & selections — optional staged layouts for games that reveal the board in steps (drafting, scenario setup).
• Rules & publishing — the rules text players read, and how you ship the game to the catalogue.

What taybl never does

There is no turn machine, no scorekeeper, and no legal-move checker. Generated games never emit a procedures block — players resolve every rule manually via drag-and-drop and the rules sidebar. (The schema retains procedures only for a few hand-authored legacy games; you will not author one.) If you find yourself wanting taybl to enforce a rule, the taybl-native answer is almost always a zone (with the right visibility) plus a line in the rules text.

Where you do the work

You build a game in the Studio. Start at the Studio tour for the lay of the land, then upload your assets to generate a first draft you can refine. Stuck on a specific concept? Use the search box at the top of any docs page, or ask the help chat.