Buttons and the table menu
Everything a player can do at a taybl table is reachable by clicking a component or a zone and picking from the menu that opens. That is fine for the long tail, but every game has two or three moves that happen constantly — shuffle the discard back in, pass hands, deal the next round — and hunting for them in a menu every single time gets old fast.
Buttons fix that. A button is a labelled action you place directly on the table, right next to the thing it acts on. Players click it and the action runs.
A button does not hold an action of its own. It names one or more entries from the automation library and runs them in order — so “collect the discards, shuffle, deal three each” is one button, and the automation your setup already uses is the automation the button replays.
A button never decides anything. It does exactly what a player could already have done by hand through a click menu — it just puts it one click away instead of three. Rules are still resolved by the people at the table.
Adding a button
In the layout editor, open the Buttons section in the left rail and press +. Drag it where you want it and size it like any zone. Then fill in the inspector:
label— what the button says. This is what players read, so write the verb: “Pass hands”, “Shuffle discard”, “Deal a round”.runs— the automations it runs, in the order you list them. Pick from the automation library, or add a new one inline.tint— an optional colour for the button face, if you want it to stand out or to match a player colour.id— the button’s internal name. Set automatically; you rarely touch it.
What a button can do
Whatever the automation library can do — shuffle, deal, draw, refill a market row, pass hands, roll dice, move a specific set of pieces somewhere, put the whole board back the way setup left it.
The interesting part is that a button takes a list. Each automation runs top to bottom, and the whole button counts as ONE action: one line in the history, and one undo to take all of it back. A player who presses “New round” and changes their mind gets the whole round back, not a third of it.
Button “New round” runs: Collect discards → Shuffle deck → Deal 3 each
If one step in the list finds nothing to do — an empty discard, a variant that is switched off — the rest still run. The button only fails if nothing at all happened.
One button, or one per player?
This is the setting worth understanding, because it is what makes buttons feel personal.
A button placed relative to a seat appears once in front of every player,
the same way a hand does — see zone scope for how per-seat
copies work. What that copy acts on is decided by target:
actingSeat— the button acts on the zone belonging to whoever clicked. This is what you want for “Flip my card” or “Draw to my hand”. Every player gets their own button, and each one minds its own business.allSeats— the button acts on every player’s copy at once. This is what you want for “Everyone reveal” or “Deal a round”. It is the default.
A button placed on the table rather than at a seat appears once for everybody.
Anyone can click any button, including one drawn at somebody else’s seat —
taybl does not police who touches what, exactly as at a real table. An
actingSeat button clicked by the wrong person still acts on the clicker’s
zone, so nothing surprising happens, and every press is recorded in the
history log either way.
The table menu
The table menu (tableMenu) is the older sibling of buttons: the same kind
of designer-authored action, but reached by right-clicking bare felt instead of
sitting on the table. It still carries its own single verb rather than naming
library automations — a label, a kind, its zones, and from, count and
direction where the verb needs them, plus an id.
Players meet these entries in the Table actions popover that right-clicking
bare felt opens. That is a different thing from the table menu taybl itself
puts in the felt’s bottom-right corner — the pill holding Undo, End turn and
the panels, which you cannot author. Nothing you write in tableMenu appears
there; see playing a game.
Use the table menu for actions that matter but are not constant — a reset, an end-of-round cleanup. Use a button for the moves players make every turn. There is no harm in having both.
Tips
- Put the button next to what it touches. A “Shuffle” button floating in the middle of the table makes players guess which pile it means.
- Label with a verb, not a noun. “Pass hands” beats “Hands”.
- Do not add a button for everything. Three well-chosen buttons read as helpful; a dozen reads as a control panel and buries the game.
- Deleting a zone eventually takes the button with it: the zone reference dies on the automation, the automation dies when it has nothing left to act on, and the button dies when its last automation goes. A button can never be left aiming at nothing.
- Two buttons that both “shuffle the deck” should name the SAME automation. Then fixing it once fixes both.