Stack

What a stack is

A stack is the canonical grouped form of tiles. deck is an alias, but the runtime term is stack.

How the system uses stacks

• a stack owns ordered tile membership
• a stack supports shuffle, draw, and deal behavior
• stack behavior preserves hidden information and face rules
• stacks collapse back toward simpler piece states when tile counts change

Breaking a stack apart and putting it back together

A stack is gone from the table once its last tile leaves it, but its tiles remember it. Pile any of those tiles back together (drop one on another, or gather them) and the same stack comes back: same name, same draw and return rules, same ghost settings, and every sequence step that pointed at it works again. Breaking a scripted deck apart to inspect it and re-stacking it by hand does not lose the script.

A pile made from tiles whose stack is still on the table (or was already put back together from its other tiles) is a new stack named "Stack". It starts with the draw and return rules of the stack its tiles came from, so a discard pile built from a deck's cards behaves like that deck until you change it.

Typical examples

• a full deck of standard playing cards
• a face-down pile of scenario cards
• a small draw pile created from imported tiles

Moving a stack

Dragging a stack's face draws its top tile. To move the whole stack, drag its spine -- the thin edge along its right and bottom sides -- or press and hold anywhere on the stack for half a second and then drag. The hold is there for a zoomed-out table, where the spine is only a couple of pixels wide. On a touch screen the hold still opens the stack's menu, as it always has.

Actions

Select a stack to reveal its actions in the Action Dock. The available actions depend on the current mode.

Interact actions

• Draw -- takes the top tile (or a chosen number) off the stack and into your hand.
• Reveal -- flips the stack's top tile face up so every player can see it.
• Deal -- opens the Deal panel to distribute tiles from the stack to players' hands as loose tiles.
• Deal Stacks -- opens the Deal Stacks panel to give every occupied seat its own stack, taken from this one. Each player receives a set number of tiles as a single stack held in their hand, not as loose tiles. This is the difference from Deal: Deal hands out cards, Deal Stacks hands out stacks. The Deal Stacks sequence step does the same thing from a sequence, so a format that opens a stack every round does not need anyone to press this.
• Search -- browses the stack's full contents so you can find and take a specific tile.
• Shuffle -- randomizes the order of every tile in the stack.
• Sort -- puts the stack in alphanumeric order by tile name, A at the top. Numbers inside names count as numbers, so Card 2 lands above Card 10. For an order that is not alphabetical, set it once on the game's Import Pieces page instead: the order the tiles are listed in there is the order an imported stack is dealt in.
• Flip Up / Flip Down -- flips the entire stack to show its tiles' faces or their backs.
• Look -- opens a private, pinned view of the stack's contents that only you can see.
• Peek -- briefly reveals the stack's hidden contents to just you.
• Cycle -- moves the stack's top tile to the bottom without drawing it.
• Open / Close -- makes a stack you are holding readable by every seat (Open), or makes it private to you again (Close). Only applies to a stack in your own hand. See Opening a stack to the table on the Player Hand page.

Draw, Deal, Deal Stacks, and Open / Close appear only when the table has Hands enabled, and Peek appears only when Peek mode is enabled.

Look and Peek are also on the right-click menu for a tile, for a tile in your hand, and for a stack, so you can open the private view without selecting the piece first.

For a complete format built on Deal Stacks, see the booster draft worked example.

Edit actions

• Edit -- opens the stack's settings.
• Copy -- duplicates the stack and its tiles onto the table.
• Rotate Left / Rotate Right -- rotates the stack on the table by the rotation increment.
• Hone -- toggles the Hone controls for nudging the stack's position and size precisely.
• Lock / Unlock -- toggles position lock so the stack cannot be dragged. Drawing still works: press and drag the stack's face to draw the top tile. Over the spine the pointer stays as the table's own cursor rather than the grab hand, because pressing there pans the view instead of moving the locked stack.
• Delete -- removes the stack from the table.

Triggers

Stacks support reactive triggers that fire when their contents change:

• Tile Added and Tile Removed -- fire when a tile enters or leaves the stack
• Sleeve Added and Sleeve Removed -- fire when a sleeve enters or leaves the stack
• Shuffled -- fires when the stack is shuffled

Stack triggers can filter by piece type and tags. See Triggers for full details.