DocsLayout & seats

Setup mode & the sequence rail

The Setup mode of the Layout Editor answers a different question from Arrange: not where do zones sit, but what happens as the table is dealt. It presents the whole opening as one ordered sequence that runs top to bottom before play.

The sequence rail

Switching to Setup turns the left panel into the sequence rail — a single timeline that interleaves two things:

  • Board-build groups come first and are derived from your setup placements — the pieces that simply start on the table. Each row is labelled and shows how many pieces it places (e.g. 19 placed on the table).
  • Authored steps follow — the setup steps you add for shuffles, deals, and other opening automation. Each shows a type chip, its title, and a one-line summary.

Click any row to select it; the canvas previews the table at that point in the sequence, so you can watch the opening build up step by step. The board groups are always first and fixed; the up/down arrows on a step row reorder the authored steps among themselves, and the trash button beside them deletes that step where it sits — the same delete as the step inspector’s Delete step, cascade and all (see below).

Editing a step

With a sequence item selected, the right inspector becomes its editor — the same panel slot that edits zones in Arrange. From there you add a step (picking its type), edit the selected placement or step, reorder, or delete it. You can also seed setup by placing pieces directly: right-click a zone on the canvas and pick from the thumbnail list, or drag a component from the browser onto it, and it joins the board-build groups.

A piece already on the table can be moved by dragging it, which is how you say where it starts on an open-play zone — one with no named cells to pick from. Drag one copy out of a stack and it becomes its own placement at that spot, leaving the rest where they were. See setup placements.

A card a deal put there drags the same way, with one difference worth knowing: it sets where the DEAL lands, so the whole batch moves together. A deal is one step drawing off a pile, not one card each, so there is no single card to peel off — to spread the pile once it has landed, give the zone landing rules. The deal step itself takes Across and Down in millimetres if the spot has to be exact. See setup automation.

Previewing setup options

If your game offers setup options — player-count variants, a chosen scenario, a difficulty — a preview-option switcher appears in Setup mode. Flipping an option re-previews the sequence for that choice, so you can check that each variant builds the table correctly. The switcher only changes what you preview; it doesn’t alter the saved definition.

It redraws the zones themselves, not only what is dealt into them: a zone that varies by variant — a discard that rests face-up in the basic game and face-down in the advanced one — shows each reading as you flip between them.

A placement or step that runs for several of an option’s values appears under every one of them, so flipping between those choices shows it staying put — and flipping to the one it leaves out shows it disappear. That is the quickest way to confirm a broad gate covers what you meant.

“Some setup effects point at a choice you removed”

A variant step offers players a set of choices, and other parts of setup can be gated to one of them — a shuffle that only happens in the advanced game, a placement that only appears with an expansion, a zone that reads differently under one of them. Remove that choice later and those effects are left pointing at something that no longer exists. They can never run again: nobody can pick a choice that isn’t there.

When that happens a green card appears above the canvas, listing every affected effect by name. Fix with AI removes them for you. It removes rather than un-gates them on purpose — clearing the gate instead would make an effect authored for one variant fire in all of them, quietly changing the table. Since the effects were already unreachable, removing them changes nothing about how the game plays.

Anything gated on several values is treated more gently — a placement, an auto step, or a zone that varies by the choice. It loses the value that disappeared and keeps running for the others, and the card says so rather than reporting a removal. Only when its last remaining value is gone does it go with it.

The fix lands as unsaved edits, exactly like a change you made by hand. Nothing is stored until you click Save layout, and Reset discards it along with the rest of your unsaved work.

Most of the time you won’t see this card at all: removing a choice, switching a variant from choices to a toggle, or deleting a variant step cleans up everything gated to it as you go — placements, automation, and any zone that varied by that choice — and tells you what went. The card is the backstop for a game that arrived already broken: an import, a generated build, or a definition edited outside the Studio.

Where the model is documented

Setup mode is the visual surface over taybl’s setup model. The underlying concepts have their own pages in the Setup & automation section:

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