Playing a game

A taybl game is a ready-to-play table — a felt surface with components on it, seats around the edge, and a rulebook you can open. Playing is nothing more than moving those things with your pointer, exactly as you would at a real table.

This is the single most important thing to understand about taybl: it is a table, not a rules engine. Nothing is auto-enforced. There is no turn police, no scorekeeper, and no legal-move checker. You draw, flip, deal, and move pieces by hand, and you resolve every rule yourself by reading the game’s own rulebook. When you are unsure what a control does, ask "how would this work on a real table?" — that is almost always how taybl models it. (See What taybl is for the mental model behind this.)

Getting to a table

There are three doors to a live table, and they answer different questions:

• A game’s own page → Play online. Opens that game’s lobby, which lists the open tables for that game only, and lets you start a new one.
• Browse games → the Open lobby tab. Every table waiting for players, across every game — the one to use when you want a game rather than a particular one. Signed-in only.
• An invite link. Drops you straight into one specific table, and needs no account at all — see Playing without an account.

A table you are already sitting at — waiting or in progress — is always findable again under My games, from any device.

Before the first turn

If a game asks you anything before play — a variant to switch on, a colour or character to claim, a shared pool to pick together, or (playing on your own) how many players to lay the table for — taybl shows a setup screen first: one question at a time, with a progress rail down the side and Continue at the foot — which becomes Start game on the last one. A game that asks nothing skips the screen and opens straight onto the felt.

It appears wherever there is something to answer — a solo table, a game with a fixed number of players, and a live session alike. In a session anyone at the table can press Start game, and the screen closes for everybody at once: leaving setup is a fact about the table, not a dismissal each player makes for themselves.

Pressing Start game is also the moment your answers take effect. Anything the designer gated to a choice — a placement, a shuffle, a scatter — is held back until then and applied against what you picked. See setup automation for what a designer can put there.

An answer can also change what a part of the table is, rather than what is dealt onto it — a discard pile that rests face-up in the basic game and face-down in the advanced one, hands that are open at two players. That is not a one-off at the start: the zone behaves that way for the whole game, and it stops being a question once someone presses Start game. See zones that change with the variant.

The play surface

Wherever you play — the designer Preview tab, a solo sandbox, or a live multiplayer session — the surface is laid out the same way:

The menu is where every control that isn’t a gesture now lives, in five parts: a status strip (the game’s name, the turn number, what phase you are in, and a Start Game button when there is a next phase to move to); Panels — Rules, History, Chat, Voice chat, Sheets, Tutorial, Designer notes, and on a narrow screen Players; Table tools — Draw, Measure, Notes, Clear; View — zoom, full screen, rotate the table, sound, Whose turn?, hot-seat, keyboard shortcuts, and the size of the chrome itself; and the zone key, which says what each mark on a zone’s edge means. Its footer holds the taybl tour and the way out of the table. See moving around the table for the tools and the view controls in depth.

Panels open as a drawer flush to the right edge of the window, floating over the felt — non-modal, with no backdrop, so play continues around it. Only one panel is open at a time; picking the same row again closes it, and so does Escape. On a phone it opens as a bottom sheet instead.

Rules is the button to reach for first in a game you have not played. It hands you the designer’s rulebook — the file itself, opened in a new tab, not a summary of it. You get it whether you are signed in, sitting as a guest on an invite link, or playing a public game with no account at all. A game with no rulebook uploaded opens a Rules panel in the drawer instead, holding the rules text the designer wrote out by hand. See rules reference.

Everything routes through a menu or a drag

Three gestures cover almost all of play. Drag relocates a component from one zone to another (draw a card into your hand, move a meeple, drop a tile on a board). Click, then click again does the same thing without dragging: the first click picks the component up, the second says where it goes. That one is on by default on a touch screen and off with a mouse, and you can set it either way under Account & profile; see handling pieces & cards. Right-click (or long-press on touch) opens a context menu of verbs for whatever is under the pointer — a card, a deck, or the bare table. Power users can drive the same verbs from the keyboard.

Where to go next

These pages cover the play surface in depth:

• Moving around the table — zoom, pan, fit, rotate, multi-select, and the hold-to-magnify / hold-to-preview keys.
• Handling pieces & cards — dragging, flipping, rotating, stacking, and the right-click verb menu.
• Decks, draws & bags — drawing, dealing, shuffling, bags, and the container inspector.
• Your hand & private zones — the hand button, private visibility, and the shared supply.
• Turns, history & undo — ending a turn, undo, the activity history, and pass-and-play.

Related

• What taybl is — the table-as-scene mental model
• Studio tour — the Preview tab you test on
• Rules reference — what the Rules button opens
• Zone visibility — who sees what on the table