Moving around the table
The felt fills the whole viewport and, by default, fits your table to the screen. These gestures move the camera and let you grab several components at once — none of them change the game state, so explore freely. The table tools at the end are the exception: what you draw and write there is saved with the game.
The table is the whole screen, not a panel inside it. Everything floating on the felt — the faces in the top corner, the supply button, your hand along the bottom, the table menu — sits on top of the table rather than beside it, so zooming in runs the board right underneath them and out to every edge. The default framing is the one place that keeps clear of all of it, which is why Reset view always brings the whole table back into the open.
Zoom, pan, and fit
Zoom lives in the table menu — the pill in the bottom-right corner of the
felt. Point at the taybl button on it and the menu opens above; click the
button to pin the menu open. Under View
sits a zoom row: − and + magnify out and in, a percentage readout
between them, and Reset view (the expand icon) snaps back to the default
framing that shows the whole table. The readout is 100% at the fit home.
| Gesture | Result |
|---|---|
| Drag on bare felt | Pan the table (canvas-style). Panning is unbounded — use Reset view to recentre |
| Middle-button drag | Pan, from anywhere |
| Hold Space and drag | Pan (shows a grab cursor), handy when the felt is crowded |
| Scroll / pinch | Zoom in and out toward the cursor |
| Reset view (table menu → View) | Reset pan and zoom to frame the whole table, clear of the floating controls |
A press that starts on a component or a control keeps its own behaviour (it drags the piece, not the camera), so you never pan by accident when you meant to move something.
Panning still works normally while you are holding a component you clicked rather than dragged (on touch by default — see handling pieces & cards) — only a click that stays put counts as choosing a destination, so a drag across the felt moves the camera and keeps hold of what you picked up. A click on bare felt that is not part of any zone puts it back down.
Letting go over bare felt
Most tables have open play on, and then the felt behaves like a real table — let go anywhere and the piece stays exactly where you put it. That is handy for a staging pile, cards you are still deciding about, or spreading out to see everything at once. You can always pick those pieces back up and drop them into a zone.
A designer can switch it off, and then the felt is scenery rather than a place: drop a card outside every zone and it springs back where it came from, because only zones hold things. The switch is in the table inspector (see Layout); new games start with it on.
The felt sits underneath every zone, the way a tabletop sits under a board. So a piece left on the felt where a zone with board artwork overlaps it is covered by that artwork — it is behind the board, not on it. Bring to front will not help: that reorders things within one zone. Right-click the piece and use Move to … to lift it into the zone you meant, or drop it somewhere the board is not covering.
Full screen and rotating the table
The felt already runs to every edge of the browser window, so Full screen — in the table menu under View — hands the table the whole display instead. It is the browser’s own full screen: press it again, or Escape, to come back out. It also has a keyboard shortcut, listed under Keyboard shortcuts in the same menu.
Rotate table, the row below it, turns the entire view 90° each press, cycling 0° → 90° → 180° → 270° — useful when you are sitting on the side of a shared screen and want the board oriented toward you.
Selecting several components at once
Hold Cmd (Ctrl on Windows) — or Shift — and drag to draw a marquee: a rubber-band box that selects every component it touches. The highlighted set then drags as a single group, so you can gather scattered pieces and move them together.
While the key is held the box wins over whatever is under your pointer, so you can start a sweep right on top of a card or a piece. That matters in a crowded play area, where there may be no empty felt left to start from. Let go of the key and everything behaves as usual: dragging a component moves that one component, and dragging the felt pans the table.
It works on loose components wherever they lie — scattered, fanned, in a slot, on a board, or out in open play — and it gathers pieces, tokens and dice, not just cards. Decks and face-down piles sit it out: a pile is one object to the table and you move it by dragging it, so a marquee drawn over one leaves it alone rather than scooping up every card inside.
Dropping a group into open play fans it out around the point you released, so nothing ends up hidden underneath anything else. A plain click on empty felt clears the selection, and so does Esc.
Hold to magnify, hold to preview
Two momentary keys let you take a closer look without changing anything — hold to engage, release to snap back:
| Key | While held |
|---|---|
| M (magnify) | Zooms in on the area under the cursor, then returns to your previous view on release |
| V (preview) | Enlarges the single component under the cursor so you can read it — and it respects hidden faces, so you never see a card you shouldn’t |
These are the defaults; every player shortcut is rebindable under Account → Keyboard shortcuts, and the table menu’s Keyboard shortcuts row (or ?) opens a reference of the current bindings. The full hotkey set for acting on components is covered in handling pieces & cards.
Table tools — pen, ruler, notes, sheets
The tools for the things you do around a game — rather than to a component — live in the table menu, the pill in the bottom-right corner of the felt. Open it and Table tools is a row of square buttons — Draw, Measure, Notes and Clear. Sheets is one section up, under Panels. Because some of them leave something behind, the important question is who can see what:
| Tool | What it is | Who sees it |
|---|---|---|
| Draw | Freehand pen on the felt | Everyone at the table |
| Measure | A live distance measurement | Only you, and only while you drag |
| Notes | Two note pads — one private, one shared | Depends on the pad — see below |
| Sheets | A list of the game’s printed pads, to open one | Only pads you are allowed to read are listed |
The last two are lists rather than tools: they open a panel in the right-hand drawer instead of arming the pointer. Only Sheets is conditional — it shows up only in a game that actually has a sheet component.
The pen
Click Draw to arm the pen, then drag across the table to draw. Release and the stroke is committed to the table for everyone to see — that is the point of it: circling a threatened piece or ringing off an area is a way of talking to the other players. While the pen is armed a Pen colour swatch appears just under the tool row; pick any colour you like. The pen stays armed after the menu closes, so you draw on the felt itself — click Draw again to disarm it and get your ordinary drag-to-pan felt back.
An armed tool takes the whole felt, not just the table — so a stroke that starts out in the margin around the board draws instead of dragging the view. That is also why an ordinary drag can no longer pan while a tool is armed. Two ways to reframe without disarming: a middle-button drag, or hold Space and drag.
Clear, at the end of the tool row, stays greyed out until something has been drawn. It clears only your own strokes — everyone else’s stay exactly where they are, so you can tidy up after yourself without wiping the table.
The ruler
Arm Measure and drag from one point to another: a dashed line follows the pointer with a live readout of the distance in mm, the unit taybl measures the table in. Handy for a wargame’s movement range or a "within three inches" rule. It is entirely transient and local — nothing is broadcast, nothing is saved, and the line vanishes the moment you let go.
The note pads
The Notes button opens your pads in the right-hand drawer, with two tabs:
| Tab | Who can read it |
|---|---|
| Mine | Only you. Your pad is stripped out of the game state before it is sent to anyone else, so it never reaches another player’s screen — not even a game master’s |
| Table | Everyone. One shared pad the whole table reads and writes — a running score, the current bid, house rules you agreed on |
Use Mine for anything you would write behind your hand: a Clue deduction grid, which cards you have seen, a plan for next turn. Because the private pad belongs to a player, it stays disabled until you have claimed a seat.
Both pads save themselves a moment after you stop typing (or as soon as you click away) rather than on every keystroke, so a burst of typing is one save. They are stored with the session, which means your notes survive a reload and are still there if you rejoin from another device. Escape or the × closes the pad, and closing it saves whatever you had just typed.
Notes deliberately sit outside undo and the history feed — writing on your pad is not a move at the table, so it never clutters the log and Undo will never roll a note back. If two players type into the shared pad at the same moment, the last save wins, exactly like two hands reaching for the same pencil.
The Sheets list
These note pads are yours; a sheet is a pad the designer printed as a component — a Yahtzee score card, a character sheet, a Clue notepad. The Sheets row in the table menu’s Panels section lists every one of those you are allowed to read, under Mine and The table’s, and clicking a row opens the pad full-size so you can write in it. Most pads live in this list rather than on the felt, so it is the way in; it also catches the ones that are on the table but awkward to click — off-screen, buried under a piece, or parked in front of a seat you aren’t sitting behind. A pad you may not read never appears in the list.
Playing solo, or previewing your own game, you are driving every seat — so every seat’s pad is filed under Mine, each labelled with the seat it belongs to.
Notes and Sheets take turns. Both open in the same right-hand drawer, which holds one panel at a time, so opening one closes the other — while Draw or Measure stays armed through either, so you can measure with a pad open.
Buttons on the table
Some games have a labelled button sitting on the felt — “Pass hands”, “Shuffle discard”, “Deal a round”. Click it and it does exactly that.
A button never decides anything or takes a turn for you. It is a shortcut the designer added for a move you could already make by hand through a click menu, put in reach because that game does it every single round. Every press is recorded in the history log like any other action, and undo reverses it.
A button drawn in front of each seat is yours — it acts on your cards, not everyone’s. One sitting out in the middle of the table acts on the shared zone it points at, and anyone can press it.
While you are dragging a piece, buttons stop responding so they can’t swallow a card you meant to drop nearby. Let go and they wake straight back up.
Related
- Playing a game — the play surface at a glance
- Buttons & the table menu — adding one to your own game
- Handling pieces & cards — acting on a component
- Your hand & private zones — your hand tray and the supply
- Sheets — a designer-built pad you write on as a component
- Turns, history & undo — what undo does and doesn’t cover
- Layout — how the table is sized and framed