DocsPlaying games

Your hand & private zones

Your personal cards and pieces live in a tray along the bottom edge of the felt, and the stock everyone shares lives behind a button in the top-right corner, so the table itself stays uncluttered. Both float over the felt rather than shrinking it, and what you see in them is per-seat: your own, oriented to your seat.

The hand tray

Your hand rests entirely off the bottom of the felt. The only thing on screen is a round hand button in the bottom-left corner, ringed in your seat colour: point at it and your cards rise into view; move away and they drop back. An unused hand therefore costs you no table at all. Hover the button to see what you are holding (e.g. 3 cards · 2 pieces).

You don’t have to go to the corner for it, either. Settle the cursor in the strip along the bottom of the table and your hand comes up to meet it — no aiming, and no trip to the corner. Crossing the strip on your way somewhere else won’t set it off, and neither will reaching for the hand button or for End turn, which sit in corners the strip leaves out. Move back up onto the table and the hand drops again.

This works while you’re dragging, too. Pick up a card anywhere on the table and carry it toward the bottom: your hand rises to meet it, and you can let go straight into it.

The cards sit straight on the felt when they come up — there is no panel or bar drawn behind them.

Inside, your hand-role zones sit in a tidy grid — up to four stacked per column, scrolling sideways if you add more. You handle cards here exactly as on the felt — drag one onto the board to play it (or click the card and then click the board), right-click for its verbs — and drag the whole tray’s contents up onto the table when it’s time. You can also rubber-band a group inside the tray to move several at once.

Pinning it open

Clicking the hand button pins your hand open so it won’t drop back — handy when you’re working out of it for a while. A green dot on the button says it’s pinned. Pinning doesn’t shrink the table: your cards lie over it, the way a hand laid down on a real table does, and the board carries on underneath. If something you need is behind them, pan the table or unpin — clicking again drops the hand back out of the way.

Putting something back

You don’t have to open your hand first. Pick anything up and your hand rises on its own for as long as you’re dragging, so there is always somewhere to drop it — and a card you’re dragging out never has the ground pulled from under it. The same is true of the supply: start a drag and it opens too. The hand button and the table menu’s pill sit at either end of the tray, and an open right-hand panel takes a bite out of that end too; your cards stop short of all of them, but the drop area runs edge to edge — a card released anywhere along the bottom still lands in your hand.

Who sees your hand

A hand zone is owner-private: you see your cards’ faces, but everyone else sees only the backs and the count. That’s the taybl model of holding cards to your chest — the privacy is enforced by visibility, not by trust, so a face-down card in your hand is genuinely redacted for other players (they can’t peek at it even by enlarging). Moving a card out of your hand onto a public zone reveals it, just like laying it on a real table. A game may also designate a Game Master seat that can see hidden information across the table.

Turning a card over in your hand

Your hand is hidden by the zone, not by which way the cards face — so which way they face is yours to use. Hover a card and press F (or right-click → Flip face-down) and it turns over for you: you see its back in the fan, and it lands face down when you play it out, however you move it. Flip it again to turn it back up.

That makes it a private marker — the card you have picked to play face down, legible at a glance without a note. Nobody else sees any difference: your hand was already redacted for them, whichever way its cards are turned. If you forget which one it was, Peek shows you the front without turning it back.

The supply

The shared pools — a bank of cubes, a pile of worker tokens, a market row that anyone can draw from — live behind the round supply button in the felt’s top-right corner. Point at the button and the panel opens below it; click it to pin it open, and click it again (or the ×) to unpin it. It also opens by itself while you’re dragging, so a piece on its way back to the bank always has somewhere to land. Its zones pack into a grid up to four across. Because a supply is shared, everyone sees the same contents; drag from it to take pieces, or drop pieces back into it to return them. Per-seat supply zones show your own instance.

You don’t have to open it before you can put something back: drag a piece at the button and the panel opens under your cursor mid-drag, so returning a cube is one gesture rather than two.

Which zones land where is a design decision — a designer routes a zone to the hand tray or the supply in the layout editor, and can size a zone’s tile to span extra columns or rows within that grid — a hand zone can span many columns to fill most of the tray (scrolling sideways), and a supply zone many rows. From a player’s seat, the rule of thumb is simple: the bottom edge is mine, the top-right button is ours.

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