Uploading assets

You do not build a game from a blank canvas. Instead you upload your source material — the rulebook and the art — and an AI pipeline reads it and generates a first-draft table: a table surface with components, zones, seats, and rules text already laid out. That draft is a starting point, never the finished game. Remember the taybl model: the AI is arranging a physical scene, not writing a program, so the more clearly your assets describe what is on the table, the better the draft.

How to edit in the Studio

On a new or draft game you land on the uploader. Drop each file into the bucket that fits, optionally tell the AI a bit more, click Upload Assets, then Build my game. The uploader is non-blocking — it shows soft advisory warnings (e.g. no rulebook staged) but lets you proceed anyway.

The upload buckets

There are five drop targets. You do not have to pre-sort every image perfectly — board art, pieces, tokens, and dice all go into Components together, and the AI sorts them in the next step where you can correct anything it gets wrong.

The distinction that decides it is one component per file versus many components per file — not whether your game is print-and-play. A single card face goes in Cards; a page holding twenty card faces goes in Uncut sheets, because it has to be cut up before any of those cards exist. That applies just as much to a retail game's token punchboard as to a PnP download. Drop a PDF on Components or Cards and taybl moves it to Uncut sheets for you — you will see it change group in the staged list.

When you navigate back to a draft, an Already uploaded list shows the files on the server with thumbnails, and you can remove any of them before regenerating.

Slicing a sheet of cards

Games often ship one image holding a whole grid of card faces rather than twenty separate files. You do not have to crop them yourself. Drop the sheet on Uncut sheets and the slicing dialog opens on its own as soon as the upload finishes.

If you filed a sheet somewhere else and only spot it later — usually on the confirm-your-components step, where it turns up labelled "Board" — set its Type to Sheet of cards (uncut). That is not just a label: it opens the slicer, and once the sheet is cut it drops out of the list and its cards take its place.

A preview draws the proposed cuts over your image so you can see the grid before anything happens. Nothing is cut until you click Slice.

• Click any cell to include or exclude it. Cells that are entirely blank are unticked for you, so a part-filled sheet just works — on a grid taybl found and on one you typed.
• If taybl cannot find the grid it says so, and offers to work it out for you — a closer look that can read a sheet the quick pass could not. You can also just type the rows and columns yourself, which is always the last word. Expect the quick pass to give up on sheets whose pieces touch with no gap between them, or that have artwork running behind the whole page: it finds cards by looking for uninterrupted background between them, and those sheets have none.
• Fit to the printed area is on by default, and it is what makes a typed grid land. Print-and-play pages usually leave a white margin, and dividing the paper by 11 x 10 puts every cut line slightly off. taybl measures where the printing actually is and divides that instead. Untick it to divide the page edge to edge.
• Nudge the fit corrects that measurement when the cuts still sit a little off. Plus is tighter, minus is wider, and the preview moves as you drag. This moves the cut lines — it is not the same as Trim edges below, which shaves each card after the lines are placed.
• Slice as picks what the pieces become: card fronts, card backs, pieces or tokens. Fronts and backs are separate sheets, so slice each one in turn.
• Mirror columns is for a back sheet that came off a duplex printer reversed. Tick it and back #1 lines up with front #1.
• Trim edges shaves a percentage off every card after the cut lines are placed, for sheets printed with bleed or crop marks. Leave it at 0 unless you can see the trim is needed — cards with a deliberate white border look wrong once it is cut away. If the whole grid is offset rather than each card being too big, the control you want is Nudge the fit above.
• Merge identical cells is on by default, and it is worth understanding: you never need one asset per printed copy. A sheet of twenty identical card backs is one card back, and a sheet printing four copies of the same card is one card. taybl treats a component as a template and the number of copies as a quantity, so merging keeps your asset list readable and still deals the right number of cards. Turn it off only if you genuinely want the repeats as separate, separately-editable assets.

After slicing, each card becomes its own asset with its own thumbnail, and the original sheet steps aside — it stays in your storage but is no longer treated as a component, so the AI models the cards and not the page they came on.

A sheet can only be sliced once. To redo it with a different grid, delete the slices first and slice the sheet again.

Sheets get a larger upload allowance than ordinary art — see Limits below.

PDFs full of components

Many print-and-play games arrive as a single PDF holding everything — the card sheets, the player aids and the rules. Others split it up: a rules.pdf and a separate cards.pdf, plus a few token sheets. Either way, the files that hold components go on Uncut sheets; a rules-only PDF goes on Rulebook. taybl reads rules text out of every PDF regardless, so a misfiled one costs you nothing.

As soon as the upload finishes, taybl reads each PDF's own text — no guessing, and no AI cost — and opens the extract dialog for you, one file at a time. (You can also reach it any time from the Extract components button on the file's row, which is there on every PDF.)

It offers on any PDF that isn't obviously a rulebook, rather than only on ones that label themselves properly. Most PDFs don't label themselves — a plain export of card sheets says nothing about what it is — and staying quiet on those is how a game gets built with none of its card art and nothing anywhere saying so. A document that is solid prose on every one of several pages is read as a rulebook and left alone; anything shorter or more sparse gets offered.

It errs towards offering on purpose, so a short instruction sheet does get flagged sometimes. When that happens, press This is just rules in the dialog. That answer is remembered against the file: the "your components are still inside this file" warning stops naming it, in the uploader and on the review step, and it stays quiet after a reload. The file is not ignored — its rules text is still read when your game is built. Re-open it from the same Extract components button and press It does hold components to undo.

When the file describes itself

A well-made print-and-play labels every page, so the dialog can show you what it found:

• Pick an edition first. PnP files usually contain the same game more than once: full ink and low ink, or two wordings of the same cards. Importing all of them would create every card twice, so you choose one.
• Tick the sections you want. The deck, the player aids, each tier of goal cards. Everything in your chosen edition starts ticked — untick what you don't need.
• Nothing is created until you press Import components.

Each page is then cut into its individual cards, and repeated art is merged: a deck's shared back is imported once with a quantity, not once per card.

When it doesn't

Most PDFs are not labelled — a plain export of card sheets says nothing about itself, and there is nothing to read. Rather than send you away to export the art by hand, taybl renders every page as a thumbnail and lets you pick the pages holding components yourself, then say what they hold. The list is the same one the confirm-your-components step offers — board, cards, pieces, tokens, dice, an uncut sheet, rules, photos — so a print-and-play board has somewhere to go. Working through a run of sheets, the answer carries to the next one, so you set it once rather than per file.

taybl then picks cut-or-whole to match, and says which under the dropdown:

• A page of many things is cut — cards, pieces, tokens — each on its own grid, exactly as an uploaded image sheet would be.
• A page that IS one thing is imported whole — a board, a mat, a background, a photo. Nothing is cut, and you get one asset per page.

A tick box overrides it either way, because some boards really do need cutting and some card pages are one picture. The sentence under the dropdown always tells you what pressing Import will actually do — worth reading, since a file can only be imported once until you delete what it produced.

What starts ticked depends on how long the file is:

• A file of three pages or fewer opens with every page ticked. At that length it is a component sheet, not a rulebook, and a line above the grid tells you it happened. Untick anything that turns out to be rules or a cover.
• Anything longer opens with nothing ticked, because it may be mostly prose. Tick the pages you want, or press Select all and untick the few you don't. Clear unticks everything.

One import takes at most 60 pages, so Select all stops there on a very long document — import the rest in a second pass. If you tick more than 60 by hand, the button says so rather than failing when you press it.

Rendering the thumbnails takes a moment on a long document, which is why it only happens when the label parse comes back with nothing. The rules text from the PDF is used either way.

Pages that could not be cut

Some sheets defeat the quick grid pass — pieces printed edge to edge, or a background illustration running behind the whole page. You never lose the page. Any page the import could not cut is kept whole as an uncut sheet, and it goes straight into the slicing queue with the rest of your sheets. Open it, and taybl takes a closer look at the layout on its own before showing you the proposed cuts — check the preview, adjust the rows and columns if it read the page wrong, and click Slice.

That is not the same as a page you asked to keep whole. Your board is filed as a board and left alone. A page nothing could be cut from is named -uncut, joins the slicing queue, and is the one taybl looks at more closely when you open it — because there, the quick pass has already failed.

So the worst case is not a failed import. It is one extra look at a picture of your own sheet with the cut lines drawn on it.

Building before the sheets are cut

If you skip the extraction and press Build my game, taybl asks first. This matters more than it sounds: with the cards still inside the file, generation has no card art to work from, so it invents components out of the rules text instead — you get a game that looks nothing like the one you uploaded. The warning names the files that are still holding components, and offers to open the extractor. You can always build anyway.

A PDF has no Type dropdown on the confirm step, for the same reason: it is not a component, it is the container the components came out of, and once its contents are extracted it steps aside on its own. An uncut image sheet does have one — set to Sheet of cards (uncut) — because that is how you tell taybl to cut it.

Removing an image a zone or card already uses is safe: that art disappears from the table straight away, and the next time you Save in the Layout Editor taybl clears the leftover reference and tells you what it cleared. You never end up with a game you can't save.

Limits

Images and PDFs get the larger allowance because a full page of high-resolution cards, or a whole print-and-play bundle, is legitimately several times the size of any single card; they are uploaded one at a time so the bigger ceiling is safe. Anything over its limit is rejected before upload. If you hit the per-game or total storage limit, remove unused assets from the Already Uploaded list and try again.

Naming your decks on the confirm step

The Component groups section on the confirm step is where you say which cards belong to which deck — "Gameplay Deck", "Goals: A King Tide" — and which back each deck uses. This is not a hint. A deck you name here is built as a component-group exactly as you described it, whatever the AI would otherwise have done, and taybl flags it as an error if the finished game spreads one of your decks across several groups.

If you imported a print-and-play PDF, the sections you ticked are already filled in as decks — one per section of card fronts — so you usually only have to check them rather than build them.

You do not need card backs to name a deck. When no backs were uploaded the back-pairing choices disappear (there is nothing to pick) and you are left with just the grouping, which still gets honoured.

Optional: help the AI

Two optional fields below the buckets bias the generation toward the right kind of game. Neither is required.

What happens while it generates

After you click Build my game, the pipeline runs through a series of steps. You watch a live checklist with a progress bar and an activity ticker; the status survives a reload, and a couple of steps may pause for your input (for example, confirming how the AI classified your component and card images).

When it finishes, the game becomes Ready and opens in the Studio. The generated game is a sandbox table — it never includes a procedures block; players resolve every rule by hand.

After the draft

Treat the first draft as exactly that. Open the Studio tour to find your way around, then refine the table on the Layout and Settings tabs — or describe changes in plain language and let the AI revise. See refining and regenerating for the refine loop and how to update a game when the schema advances.

Related

• What taybl is
• Studio tour
• Refining and regenerating