Overview

Containers define areas of the table that can “hold” (or, well, contain) Components. A Container may also hold one or more other Containers inside it. Common uses of containers include boards, player hands, player mats, and zones for decks or resources.

Attributes

Here are the most common attributes to configure:

• Name
• (Hidden Style: Not necessarily a commonly used attribute but you can find more details in “Open vs. Closed Containers / Hidden Style” below.)
• Orientations: If this is greater than 1, players can rotate the container using the q and e keys or by right-clicking and selecting Rotate. If set to 2, the container will rotate 180°. If set to 4, the container will rotate 90°, and so on. When a container rotates, everything inside it rotates together (even if the contained items do not have the same defined orientations).
• Height & Width: Define the dimensions of the container. For example:
  • A 20” by 30” game board could be 1000 x 1500, if you have decided that your components and assets will be based on a resolution of 200 pixels per inch.
  • A horizontal hand for 10 playing cards (sized 125 x 175) could be 1270 x 195, if you wish to have 10 pixels of “margin” around the cards.

View Policies

By default, all players can see all objects. To hide objects from some players, such as cards in players’ hands, you’ll need to configure the View Policy of each of those containers. This must be done not to the component template that defines the container, but rather to that component’s individual objects in the game.

1. Right-click the container object showing on the surface and select Seats.
2. Select the player seat that is allowed to see the objects in that container. If you’ve added an Admin seat, also select that seat to also allow the Admin to see the objects.
3. Select View Policy in the right-click menu and select Allow Seats.

Open vs. Closed Containers

A container object can be open or closed; During a game, you can toggle between the two by hitting F after selecting the container.

Generally, you can interpret “closing a Container” as hiding everything inside the Container from all players. Put another way, Screentop will place the Container’s “layer” on top of (before) everything it contains, fully hiding any objects inside it (number of objects, their outlines, their arrangement).

Here’s what the Container itself looks like in each case (for Seats who may view the Container as per the Container’s View Policy)

• If a Container is open, ****then its base asset (or base fill colour) is shown.
• If a Container is closed, ****then its cover asset (or its cover fill colour) is shown.

Hidden Style