What spaces are
Spaces are guidance and rules entities for the table. They tell players where pieces belong, who can access an area, and how placement should be organized.
How the system uses spaces
- spaces provide placement targets and placement constraints
- spaces can carry access and visibility semantics
- spaces can normalize the rotation of the pieces sitting in them
- spaces are below pieces in table layering so pieces remain the primary manipulated objects
- layouts generate multiple spaces from a compact configuration instead of storing a separate layout runtime family
Visibility
A space is visible by default, so a table you have just laid out looks like the table you laid out. Hide an individual space with the Visible switch in its Space Settings when you want the rule without the outline, and it stays hidden until you turn it back on.
Changing the default did not change spaces that already existed. A space you hid before, or a space on a table you built earlier, keeps exactly the visibility it had.
Who can reach a space
A space's Access setting decides who may act on the pieces inside it: All Players, specific seats, or the seats adjacent to its owner. Others Can See is a separate question, and the two do different jobs.
- Access is who may pick a piece up, draw from a deck, press a button, move anything.
- Others Can See is what everyone else is shown: Everything, just an occupancy count, or Nothing.
Setting Others Can See to Everything while Access is limited to certain seats is a normal thing to want, and it means exactly what it says: other players watch that area in full and cannot touch it. Seeing is not touching. A piece you may not reach shows the ordinary table pointer rather than the grab hand, and a press on it pans the table the same way a press on bare felt does.
Rotate on placement
A space decides how the pieces sitting in it are angled. There are three choices in Space Settings:
- Follow Space -- pieces line up with the space while they sit in it, whatever angle they arrived at. Nothing is written to the piece, so taking it out reveals the rotation it always had. Rows, grids and fans turn with the space too, so a rotated space reads as a rotated slot rather than a straight line of cocked cards. This is the default for new spaces.
- Keep Current -- pieces are left at whatever angle they already had.
- Rotate to Fit -- the space's angle is written onto the piece permanently. Take it out and it stays turned.
Follow Space normalizes a piece's own rotation, it does not add to it: a card turned 20 degrees dropped into a space turned 30 degrees is drawn at 30, not 50. Exhausting a card still reads as a turn relative to its slot, exactly as it does under Rotate to Fit.
Spaces that existed before Follow Space arrived were left on Keep Current, so no table changes the way it looks on its own.
Space categories
Triggers
Spaces support reactive triggers that fire when pieces enter or leave:
- Piece Added -- fires when a piece is placed on the space
- Piece Removed -- fires when a piece is removed from the space
Space triggers can filter by piece type and tags. See Triggers for full details.