Zone arrangement

A zone’s arrangement describes how its contents physically lay out — the difference between a tidy deck, a fanned hand, and a chessboard. It is a rendering choice, not a rule: it shapes how components sit in the zone, never what a player is allowed to do with them.

There are seven arrangements:

• stack — a single pile, one component on top of the next (a deck, a discard).
• fan — contents spread out and overlap, like a held hand of cards. The fan sizes itself to the zone box: a few cards spread to fill it, a crowded one tucks tighter, and every card keeps one edge visible. A fan spreads side by side by default, but it can spread downward instead — see spread direction below.
• grid — contents snap to the cells of a structured board.
• scatter — contents are packed loosely into the zone box, wrapping into as many rows as the box has room for; the zone arranges them for you, so an exact drop position is not preserved. The pack follows the box’s shape: widen the zone and the rows grow, make it tall and narrow and it becomes a single column. Reach for it when a zone holds a small mixed handful you want tidied for you — a bulk supply of one component reads far better as a stack (one chip and a count badge, however deep the pile), and a play area where pieces should stay put belongs in free. The one play-style zone that still wants scatter is a dice tray: clicking a tray to roll every die in it is switched off inside an open-play zone, so a hand-built dice tray should stay scatter — see dice.
• free — an open play surface with no grid: components stay at the exact spot they are dropped and never snap. Ideal as a large “place anything anywhere” background that other zones (decks, supplies) sit on top of — see layering below. This is the usual choice for a play area: a piece dropped there stays exactly where the player put it, rather than being re-packed into rows.
• slot — a single-component slot that holds exactly one thing at a time.
• bag — a closed container drawn from blindly (a tile bag, a chit pool). Contents are normally hidden. Set infinite to model an unlimited supply where drawing clones instead of removing.

How to edit in the Studio

Open your game → Layout tab → select a zone. In the Properties card, the Arrangement dropdown offers Stack, Fan, Scatter, Single slot, Open play (freeform), and Grid. Choosing Grid reveals a dedicated Grid card for the cell topology; choosing Stack reveals the Stack appearance control described below. Choosing Fan — or a Stack you are using as a play area — reveals Spread direction and Align contents.

Two pairings matter. A stack zone reads its presentation from stackDisplay: topCard (the default) shows the top component’s facing, while surface shows the zone’s own surfaceAsset art instead — useful for a pile with dedicated artwork. And a grid zone is incomplete without a grid spec; the editor surfaces the Grid card so you can lay out the cells.

A single cell can hold more than one component. Pieces stair-step so you can see the stack; cards pile up like a deck — the cell shows the top card with a count badge, and right-clicking the cell opens the full pile. So a supply tableau of ten-card piles, one pile per cell, reads as ten neat decks rather than a hundred loose cards.

Spread direction

A fan can spread in any of four directions, and the choice decides which card sits on top — fully visible — and therefore which edge of every other card stays showing. That is the whole point of it: you pick the direction that keeps the readable part of your cards uncovered.

So a card with its title across the top — a name band, a cost, a suit — wants Bottom on top: the fan runs down the zone and every title stays clear, which is the shape of a solitaire tableau column or a played-card timeline. A card whose readable band is a footer wants Top on top instead: spread it downward and each footer would be buried by the card that follows it.

It is the same fan whichever way it runs — it still sizes itself to the zone box, still tucks tighter as it fills up, and still honours visibility and landing rules. Only the direction changes, so a tall narrow zone is all a vertical fan needs. You can also drag a card along the fan to reorder it in any of the four — see handling pieces & cards.

The control also appears on a stack zone you are using as a play area, where the pile shows every card at a small fixed offset rather than collapsing to a top card and a count; there the direction decides which way that offset runs. On an ordinary deck there is nothing to spread — every card sits on one spot — so spreadDirection is ignored.

Alignment

A fan sizes itself to its zone box, but it does not always fill it — most obviously when the zone holds a single card. By default the contents sit in the middle, with felt on either side. Align contents (align) tucks them against an edge of the box instead.

Pinning one edge leaves the other axis centred, so Left edge means centre-left rather than the top-left corner. That is usually what a one-card zone wants: a single played card tucked against the left of a wide strip, with room to its right for the cards that follow it.

Alignment and spread direction are independent. The direction decides which way the row runs and which card ends up on top; the alignment moves the finished row as a block. So a fan spreading down and aligned left runs down the left-hand edge of its zone. Like the spread, the control appears on a fan and on a stack used as a play area, and is ignored everywhere else.

The open-play board

A free zone with a Surface image is how taybl models a printed board whose spaces are not a neat row-and-column lattice — a map of territories, a rail or route network, a roll-and-move track that wanders around the sheet. The art is the board; a piece goes exactly where a player puts it, the same as at a physical table. Starting pieces are still pinned precisely: a setup placement on a free zone takes a freepoint_x_y cell (whole millimetres from the centre of the zone box), so the game opens correctly set up.

You author those the same way a player moves a piece: in Setup mode, drag the piece on the canvas to where it should start. The placement editor also takes the millimetres directly, as Across and Down, when a spot has to be exact. See setup placements.

This is what a generated game gives you for that kind of board. If you would rather pieces snapped to fixed spots, switch the zone Arrangement to grid and pick the Node graph type, then place your nodes.

When the board is a card

Some boards are not printed at all — they are dealt. A location card laid face down and turned over when a player reaches it, a tile that becomes the map for its corner of the table, a scenario card whose art is the play area for the round. Tick Card is the board (cardBase) on a free zone and the bottom-most card in that zone becomes the thing everything else stands on: it is laid out to fill the zone box and drawn beneath the other pieces, and anything dropped in afterwards lands on top of it at the exact spot it was dropped — the way a meeple sits on a tile.

It is still a card, not a backdrop. Flip it, drag it, right-click it, deal a fresh one over the top; only its layout changes. Turning it face up leaves every piece standing on it exactly where it was. The pieces stay real pieces too — ordinary occupants of the zone you can drag off and inspect — which is what separates this from pinning a marker onto a card with Attachable. Those become small fixed chits, and on a base card taybl deliberately does not offer them at all: a piece dropped here always lands on the card.

Deal one card into each of a row of these zones and you have a modular board that is laid out fresh every game. The setting only applies to a free zone — on a stack or a grid there are no loose positions for the pieces on top, so it is rejected rather than quietly ignored.

Layering zones

Zones may overlap, and the Layer field (in the Position & size card) sets their draw order — a higher layer paints on top. Use Bring to front / Send to back to restack without typing numbers. The common pattern is a large free zone sent to the back as a background, with decks, supplies, and other zones layered on top: a drop over the exposed background lands in the free zone, while a drop over a stacked zone lands in that zone. Tick Lock on the background so you can drag the zones on top without grabbing it.

If you want that background to be the whole table, you do not have to build it by hand at all — Open play in the table inspector is on for every new game, so the felt itself already accepts drops, with nothing to size, lock or keep at the back. Reach for the hand-built free zone when you want a specific region to behave that way rather than the entire table.

Related

• Zones overview
• Grids — required for a grid arrangement
• Decks — the stack + draw pairing
• Zone roles
• Zones that change with the variant — a different arrangement per variation