Build a table: edit mode, pieces, decks and spawners
Turn on edit mode in a Virtual Table room, add decks, dice, pieces, zones and holders, and set their properties.
Last reviewed October 19, 2026
This article is for the person setting up the room before a playtest. In edit mode you put every deck, die, piece and zone on the table and tell each one how to behave.
What this page helps you do
- Enter and leave edit mode.
- Add decks, dice, pieces, notes, zones, holders, counters, labels, timers, scoreboards, turn trackers, seats and buttons.
- Fill a deck with cards and set zone and holder behaviour.
- Make a supply of pieces with a spawner.
- Pick what the table is covered with: felt, wood, a playmat or the plain table.
- Import a playingcards.io (.pcio) room.
- Save a setup of the table and load it back later.
You'll start inside a room (Prototypes > Virtual Table, then Open a room).
Before you start
- Beta, rolling out to teams. If Prototypes is missing from your sidebar, your team is not in the rollout yet.
- Plan: Pathfinder plan and up. Teams without it see "Virtual Table is a Pathfinder plan feature" with Upgrade to Pathfinder. Quick Setup is Oracle and LaunchBoom only, 50 builds per team per day.
- Roles: Collaborators cannot use the Component Designer or 3D Mockups. They see and play the rooms of the games they were given, and the rooms with no game that they made; creating, renaming and deleting a room needs edit access to its game (see Save and load setups below for setups). Guests can play in a room but never edit it.
Turn on edit mode
Click Edit in the toolbar. The add buttons appear, along with Undo and Redo. Click Done editing to go back to playing.
Helpful details
- Key areas: The add buttons: Add deck, Add dice, Add piece, Add note, Add zone, Add holder, Add counter, Add label, Add timer, Add scoreboard, Add turn tracker, Add seat, Add button, then Quick Setup, Add image, Add booklet (PDF) and Import .pcio.
- What you can do: Drag anything to place it. Select several and move them together. Lock a widget so nobody drags it by mistake. Switch on Flat in the properties of any widget (labels, pen drawings and typed text aside) to draw it without shadow or thickness, for everyone at the table.
- Good to know: A room holds up to 2000 widgets. Only members edit; guests see the table but not the edit tools.
Choose the table surface
In edit mode, click Table in the top right corner and pick Felt, Wood, Playmat or Plain. A table with no background image is the playmat; Plain is the gray table the Virtual Table had before.
Helpful details
- Key areas: The surface is the room's background, so everyone at the table sees the same one, and it travels with Save setup and Undo like any other change.
- What you can do: Picking a surface while a board image is the background replaces that image (Undo brings it back). With an uploaded background, the menu's Select background image selects it so you can change it in Properties.
- Good to know: To play on your own art instead, add it with Add image and tick Use as background (see below).
Fill a deck
Add a deck, select it, and open Properties. Under Cards, click Edit Cards.
Helpful details
- Key areas: In the cards editor: Upload images (one card per image, or per page of a PDF), Fronts from PDF (one card per page, in order) and Backs from PDF (a one-page PDF backs every card; a longer one pairs its pages with the cards in order), Import CSV and Export CSV, All +1 to add one copy of every card, and a quantity per card with Increase and Decrease. Import from a component fills the deck from a Component Designer render (see Send a component to the Virtual Table). The first pictures you add to a deck with no art set its shape: the deck keeps its width and takes their proportions, so the cards match your art.
- What you can do: Tick Face down so the deck shows its back. Turn drawn cards face up decides whether a drawn card flips; off, a face-down deck deals face-down cards. Drawn cards go sets where a drawn card lands: Beside the deck, fanned (the default), In a row, to the right, In a row, to the left, In a column, downward or In a column, upward. With a row or a column picked, Card spacing sets the gap between drawn cards; below zero they overlap, like a fanned hand. Show card count (off by default) tells everyone how many cards are left.
- Good to know: A deck holds up to 500 cards. Click a card's name to rename it.
Set up zones and holders
A zone is an area that arranges whatever is dropped in it. A holder is a slot that snaps one or more widgets into place.
Helpful details
- Key areas: Zone Layout: Pile, Horizontal, Vertical, Grid or Splay (with an Overlap slider). Private hides everything inside from non-owners. Holder Allowed widgets restricts what snaps in (Cards, Tokens, Dice, Counters, Decks, Notes).
- What you can do: Make a holder a Player hand: everyone can put cards there and each player only sees their own. Tick Hide the frame while playing for slots drawn on a board image.
- Good to know: Any widget can have an Owner seat and can be marked Private, so only the owner sees its front. To everyone else a private zone looks like frosted glass: they see blurred shapes where things lie in it, never what they are (a Flat one stays solid with a lock). A holder is drawn as a tray sunk into the table, unless its frame is hidden.
Add pieces, dice and images
Add piece offers built-in pieces (Meeple, Pawn, Cube, Puck, Pin, Marble, Poker Chip, Checkers, King Checkers, House, Building, Pig, Hex Flat, Hex Point and flat 2D versions) or a Piece image you upload.
Helpful details
- Key areas: Dice take Custom faces: each face can show text, a Game Icon or an image, and a double-click rolls the die. Tokens take a comma-separated list of Faces ("alive, dead, stunned") and a double-click cycles them.
- What you can do: Add image puts a picture on the table; tick Use as background to make it the backdrop, with Fit, Fill or Pattern and an Opacity. That is how you put a board under everything.
- Good to know: Images must be PNG, JPEG, WebP or GIF and 5 MB or smaller. You can also pick a PDF: its pages are turned into images in your browser, and Add image puts every page on the table side by side (up to 50 pages). Anywhere a single image goes, such as a piece or one card, a PDF uses its first page. To swap the picture of an image already on the table, select it and click Replace image: it keeps its place and width. For a board that folds, set Fold in the image's properties to Down the middle or Across the middle to draw a crease; No fold is a flat sheet.
- Also: A token without an image is a circle; its Corner radius slider rounds it less (0% is a square, 50% a circle). Beside every Color row, the rainbow Custom color swatch opens a picker for any color.
Add a rulebook or score pad as a booklet
Add booklet (PDF) puts a PDF on the table, a rulebook, a scenario book or a score pad, and players flip through it with the arrows under the pages.
Helpful details
- Key areas: In the booklet's properties: Name, Show spreads (two pages side by side like an open book, with the front and back covers on their own) and Open at page.
- What you can do: Turn a page and everyone at the table sees it turn. Click the page number between the arrows to type a page and jump straight to it, or right-click the booklet and choose Browse pages to see every page as a thumbnail and click the one you want. To read in comfort, click the magnifying glass next to the page number (or right-click and choose View larger): the booklet opens large on your screen only, and the arrows under it, the arrow keys or a page number typed between them still turn the page for everyone. Players can turn pages any time, even during someone else's turn, and guests can too. The page turns over like paper, and the edges of the pages show how far into the book you are.
- Good to know: A booklet holds up to 300 pages. Each page is turned into an image when you add the PDF, so a long rulebook takes a moment to add but opens quickly for every player. Use View larger or zoom in on the table to read small print.
Make a supply with a spawner
Select a piece and tick Spawner in its properties. The hint reads: "A supply of this piece. While playing, dragging it pulls out a new copy, and dropping a copy back on it puts the copy away."
Helpful details
- Key areas: Limit is the most copies out at once. Leave it empty for no limit.
- What you can do: Drop a whole selection of copies back on the spawner to put them all away at once.
- What you can do: Right-click a copy and click Delete to put it away without dragging it back. With several copies selected, the button deletes them all. Guests can do this too; locked copies stay.
- Good to know: One spawner replaces a pile of 40 identical cubes and keeps the table tidy.
Import a .pcio room
In edit mode, click Import .pcio. The dialog Replace this table? warns that importing removes everything on this table, for everyone in the room. Click Choose file.
Helpful details
- Key areas: Progress runs through "Parsing .pcio file...", "Uploading assets", "Mapping widgets..." and "Import complete".
- What you can do: Read the import report. It names objects of unsupported kinds, stock images that could not be brought over, text printed on cards that was left out, and automation steps that use features the table does not have yet.
- Good to know: Do this in a fresh room; the import cannot be undone.
Save and load setups
Next to Undo and Redo, Save setup keeps a copy of the table as it is now, under a name you choose ("4 players", "Round 3 test"). Load setup lists the room's setups and puts the table back the way it was when one was saved. Both work in and out of edit mode.
Helpful details
- Key areas: A setup holds everything on the table: pieces and cards where they lie, decks with their cards in order, zones and holders with what is in them, booklets on their page, counters, scores and seats, pen drawings and typed text. A running timer is saved stopped at the time it shows. Your zoom and scroll are not part of it; every player keeps their own view.
- What you can do: To replace a setup, pick it from the list under the name in the Save setup window, or type its name (the button turns into Replace). Saving also refreshes the room's picture in your rooms list. Delete a setup with the bin next to it. A room keeps up to 50 setups, shared by the whole team.
- Good to know: Loading asks Load "name"? first, because it replaces everything on the table for everyone in the room and cannot be undone. Save the current table first if you want to keep it.
- Collaborators: In a room of a game they were given, a Collaborator sees and loads its setups, and saves, replaces and deletes them when they can edit that game; with view access only, saving shows "Couldn't save the setup. Try again." In a room with no game that they made, they see only the setups they saved themselves. Rooms of other games are not in their list.
Use the right-click menu and the view
Right-click any widget for its actions: Flip card, Roll dice, Draw card, Shuffle deck, Flip pile, Search deck, Start timer / Pause timer, Increment / Decrement, Cut (edit mode), Order (Bring to front / Send to back), Align and distribute (when several are selected), Group / Ungroup, Delete. Clicking a widget only selects it: its place in the stack changes only through Order. On a touch screen, press and hold a widget for half a second to open the same menu.
Helpful details
- Key areas: View controls: Zoom in, Zoom out, Reset zoom, Fit to view. A toggle decides whether scrolling zooms or moves the table, another turns the table effects on or off, and the speaker turns table sounds on or off.
- What you can do: Turn on card preview so resting the pointer on a card enlarges it. The table effects button next to it turns the effects off for you alone: pieces are drawn flat and nothing animates, which helps on a slow computer.
- Good to know: Search deck lists every card in a deck with a search box. Point at a card and click Draw to take it alone, or click cards to select them (Shift-click selects a range) and click Draw 3 cards (the count follows your selection) to take them all at once; Draw as a pile puts them in a new pile beside the deck instead, and Clear unselects them. Table sounds are off until you turn them on: cards sliding off a deck, shuffles, dice, buttons and pages turning. The choice is yours alone and is kept on this device.
Tips & common questions
How do I put a game board under the pieces? Add image, upload the board, tick Use as background, and pick Fit so the whole board shows.
How do I put the rules on the table? Add booklet (PDF) and pick the rulebook. Tick Show spreads if it reads better as an open book.
Can players see each other's hands? Not if the hand is a Player hand holder, or a Private zone owned by their seat. Cards elsewhere are visible to all.
Why can't my playtesters add a deck? Only team members can edit. Guests play with what is on the table. Set everything up before you share the link.
How do I reset the table between playtests? Lay out the starting position once and Save setup. After each session, Load setup brings every piece back to where it started.
Why do my cards and pieces have shadows? Everything lies on the table with a shadow and some thickness: a deck stands taller the more cards it holds, a six sided die shows pips, zones are sunk into the table, and counters, timers and scoreboards are small panels. Uploaded art is never painted over. Flat in a widget's properties draws it the old way for everyone, and on a deck it covers the cards dealt from it too; the table effects button in the view controls does it for you alone. Your system's reduce motion setting also stops the animations.
What moves on the table? A drawn or dealt card flies from the deck to its spot. A shuffled deck splits in two and riffles back together, showing only card backs. Cards turn over when flipped, a counter rolls to its new number, a seat's score bumps and a scoreboard row lights up when they change, the turn marker glides to the next player, a button presses down, and a countdown timer pulses red in its last ten seconds. Flat keeps the motion and removes only the depth; the table effects button turns both off for you.
What does the import report mean by "left out"? The .pcio file used a widget type or automation the Virtual Table does not support yet. The rest of the room came through.