Zone scope
A zone’s scope decides how many copies of it exist at the table. There are two values:
shared— one instance at the table. A communal draw pile, a central discard, the shared board, a market. Everyone interacts with the same single region.perSeat— one instance per seated player. Each player gets their own copy: a hand, a player board, a personal capture pile, a player mat. Add a fourth seat and a fourth copy appears automatically.
Scope is about count, not visibility. A perSeat zone is not automatically
private — a row of face-up player tableaus is perSeat and fully public.
Privacy is a separate field, view; see zone visibility.
The two fields together are how you give each player their own
sheet: scope: perSeat puts one score pad or character sheet
in front of every seat, and view then decides whether the table can read it
(public, a Yahtzee card) or only its owner can (owner, a Clue notepad).
How perSeat interacts with seats and setup
A perSeat zone is templated against the seats you place in the
layout: every seat gets its own copy of the zone,
positioned relative to that seat so each player’s copy sits in front of them.
In the layout editor you can edit all copies in lockstep, or unlink one seat to
give a single player a different position (the inspector calls this “Make
different for this player only”).
Setup placement has a matching idea. A setup placement
into a perSeat zone can be marked perSeat so the same starting contents are
dealt into every player’s copy — e.g. “each player starts with one worker
in their supply.” A shared-scope placement, by contrast, fills the single
communal zone once.
How to edit in the Studio
Open your game → Layout tab → select a zone. In the Properties card, the Who uses it dropdown sets scope: Shared (one at the table) or Each player (one copy per seat). Switching to Each player makes the per-seat copies appear immediately in the preview.
Switching scope moves the zone as well as relabelling it. Going to Each
player re-anchors the zone’s box to the seat, so one copy appears in front
of every player; going to Shared re-anchors it to the table, collapsing
the per-seat copies into a single region at that spot — you will usually want
to drag it somewhere sensible afterwards. A few per-seat-only settings are
cleared on the way to Shared, because they have no owner to refer to: a
view of Owner only, contents facing the owner, and the Hand tray
placement. Any per-player setup placements into the zone become plain
placements. Pip does the same thing if you ask it to.
| Scope | Copies | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
shared | One at the table | Draw pile, central discard, the board, a market, a shared supply |
perSeat | One per seated player | Hands, player boards, personal capture piles, per-player supplies |
Related
- Zones overview
- Seats — what per-seat copies are templated against
- Zone visibility — privacy is separate from scope
- Sheets — one score pad or character sheet per seat
- Setup placements — dealing into every player’s copy