Spectators and Game Masters are special roles that players can take. They influence what information players can see and how they interact with the game.

Spectators

You can switch to being a spectator in the player options. Spectators don’t occupy a player slot and always have a grey cursor and chat color. In the player list, their color is transparent. Spectators cannot interact with objects on the table and other players can’t see their cursor. Voice and text chat work as for other players, though.

By default, spectators can’t see any hidden information: hand cards and held cards of all players are hidden, they can’t peek under cards and can’t use the stack or container explorer. There’s a setting in the session permissions that allows spectators to see all hidden information instead. When a spectator peeks or uses an explorer, other players are not notified like they would be if a regular player performs the same action. Another session permission allows you to disable spectators entirely.

Game Masters

In the session options under player slots, the host can assign slots to be game masters. A player in a game master slot can see all hidden information, like a spectator when the spectators see all permission is true. Game masters can also interact with anything: they can take cards from the hands of other players, for example.

If you want to change where the packages that are downloaded from mod.io are stored, you need to enter the path you want to use in a file to tell mod.io where to save the downloaded packages. Here’s how to find the file (globalsettings.json) depending on your platform:

• Windows Open an explorer window and type %localappdata% in the address bar. Then, go to the mod.io folder.
• Mac In the finder menu, click on “Go”, then “Go to Folder…” and enter ~/Library/Application Support/mod.io
• Linux In your home directory, go to the mod.io folder

In the file, you will see an entry that looks like this: {"RootLocalStoragePath":"C:/Users/Public/mod.io/"}
Change the path inside the brackets to the folder you want. On Windows, take care that you use / instead of \ to separate the path. For example, you can modify the file to look like this: {"RootLocalStoragePath":"E:/Game Data/mod.io/"} to store your downloaded packages in the folder E:\Game Data\mods\. If the file contains multiple entries, you can delete all except one.

You can attach tags to various entities in order to modify their behavior. Tags have three main uses:

• For snap points, tags can define what objects can snap to a particular snap point.
• For containers, tags can define what objects can be inserted into the container.
• In the container explorer, stack explorer, and object library, the search will find objects where a tag matches the search term in addition to objects where the name matches.

There are a couple of places where you can edit tags:

• In the in-game object properties, you can set which tags an object has.
• In the in-game object properties for a container, you can also set the container tags: they determine what objects can be inserted into the container. If the container tags are not empty, only object that have at least one matching tag can be inserted.
• In the editor object properties pane, you can set the default tags for objects of this type. A newly created object will have these tags, but they can be modified in the in-game object properties.
• In the editor snap points pane, you can set tags for each snap point. If tags for a snap point are not empty, only objects that have at least one matching tag can snap to the snap point.
• In the editor for card objects and similar types like tiles or tokens, you can set tags for each image index in the deck. Card tags are used in the card stack explorer window to quickly find cards with a tag that matches the search term. If an object is a single card (and not a stack of cards), the tags used for snapping and containers will be combined from both the object tags and the card tags for this card.
  When you use tags from scripting, myCard.getTags() returns only the object tags, and the card tags are accessible using CardDetails.tags, for example myCard.getCardDetails().tags for a single card.

The tag editor always shows all tags that are in use for the current game (when used in-game or in preview mode) or the current package (when used in the editor). This allows you to quickly find and activate tags that are already used elsewhere. To create a new tag, enter the name in the search field and press enter or the “Plus” button.

Not all games you create should be accessible for everyone, or you may have a prototype that you want to test that isn’t ready to go public yet. You can make your package private by checking the “Private” checkbox when you upload you package in the editor. If you want to make it public later, uncheck the checkbox when uploading a new version or change the visibility in the Edit section of the mod.io page of your mod.

If you want to play with others while your package is still private, you can use preview feature of mod.io. It allows you to add other users who will have access to your package directly, or generate a preview link that others can use to subscribe. To add other users to for your mod, open the mod.io page, go to “Package Admin”, then “Preview”, and change the “Enable preview link” option to “Users with access only” and press Update. You can then add users by their mod.io username (identical to their Steam or Epic username if they haven’t changed it). They can then subscribe to the package through the mod.io page when they are logged in with their Steam/Epic account, or in-game when they try to join a game that uses your private package.

Instead of adding users manually, you can also use preview links: Change the “Enable preview link” option to “Anyone with preview URL” and press Update. You’ll see a link below that you can share with your players. If they are logged in using their Steam account (or Epic if they own Tabletop Playground on Epic Games Store or Microsoft store), they can subscribe and the package will be downloaded in-game. Since the preview links work through the regular browser, make sure that your players are logged in to mod.io with their Steam/Epic account! If they have already created an account using their mail address, they can link it with their Steam/Epic account by clicking on their user name in the upper right and selecting “My Account”. At the bottom of the page there’s a “Connected Accounts” section, switching on the Steam or Epic icon will open a prompt asking them to log in with their account.

You can find more information about previews in the mod.io blog post: https://blog.mod.io/insider-invite-now-live-on-mod-io-c3c2d6568d3f

The most important place to find creations by the community is the game’s mod.io page, where you’ll find all games, expansions, and object libraries: https://tabletopplayground.mod.io. You can find guides and useful hints created by the community in two places:

On mod.io: https://tabletopplayground.mod.io/guides
And on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/app/838410/guides/

If you want to add your own guides, mod.io is the better place: future players who might not use Steam will be able to find your content there, too.