Note: The official Basic Concepts page is a very short version of this page.
This page provides a description and some examples for each “building block” Screentop uses. The properties of each of these building blocks are further documented in the other sub pages under “Building Blocks”.
If you are just starting out, this page is probably a good starting point to gain a basic idea of how Screentop works and represents game objects.
A Component in Screentop is similar to a template or blueprint. Boards, cards, dice, and tokens are all represented as Components.
There are currently four kinds of components:
You can create multiple visual representations of a Component, see “Variants”. A Component also has a shape and some additional attributes such as Flip Axis for Tile components and Sides for die components.
A variant is a unique visual representation of a Component. For example, a playing card Component would typically be a Tile and would have 52 Variants, one of each rank + suit. The Component itself serves as a “template” for all the individual cards (Variants).
Use variants to define what a Component should look like. Variants can be simple definitions of color, or they can display an image from an Asset. Some Components have a single variant (such as a board, for example), whereas others have multiple variants (such as a deck of cards or asymmetric player mats).
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.
An object is an instance of a Component’s Variant. For example, a game that requires two decks of playing cards would have 104 Objects, 2 of each available Variant of the playing card Component.
You can add one or more Dropzones to a Container. Dropzones provide the following benefits: