Deck and Bag Search

Search lets one player look through a whole pile privately — every card in a deck, every item in a bag — find what they need, and take it, without any of it becoming public. It is the answer to tutoring in a card game, to retrieving a specific unit from a bag, to checking a discard pile: the alternative used to be revealing the pile to everybody, which destroys the hidden information the rest of the table depends on.

Because a search hands one player the contents of a pile, who may do it is authored, not assumed. Edit Mode gives you two places to say so, and one rule for how they combine.

The deck's own settings#

Select a deck or a bag and the Inspector's entity section shows two dropdowns. They appear for those two kinds only — the same pair the runtime allows a search on.

Search — who may open one:

Option	Who that is
Not set	Nothing is authored here. The zone decides, and then the default does.
No one	Search is off for this pile.
Owner seat only	The holder of the pile's owning seat. An unowned pile means nobody.
Host only	The host.
Owner seat and host	Either of the two above.
Anyone	Everyone at the table.

After search — what happens to the remainder when the session closes:

Option	What it does
Not set	Falls through to the zone and then to the default, Shuffle the rest.
Shuffle the rest	The host shuffles what is left.
Keep the order	The pile is left exactly as it was, minus anything taken.

Shuffle the rest is the default because a player who has just browsed a pile now knows its order. Leaving it untouched leaks that order for the rest of the game, which is the same reason a physical tutor ends with a shuffle. Keep the order exists for piles whose order is the point — a discard pile, a scripted sequence — where shuffling would destroy authored state.

The zone's setting#

Select an Area seat zone and the Inspector offers a single Search dropdown, the same audience list, with no After search. It sets the rule for every searchable pile sitting inside that zone that has not been set individually.

It is offered on area zones only, and for the same reason Interaction is: the runtime resolves a pile's zone rule through the smallest containing area zone, so the control on any other zone type would author a value nothing reads.

Which one wins#

The pile's own setting overrides the zone's — an author who set a rule on this particular deck meant this particular deck.

The precedence runs deck, then zone, then default, and it is resolved per setting, not per source:

The deck says	The zone says	Result
Search: Anyone	Search: Host only	Anyone — the deck wins.
Search: Not set	Search: Host only	Host only — inherited from the zone.
After search: Keep the order, Search: Not set	Search: Anyone	Audience Anyone from the zone, order Keep the order from the deck.
Both Not set	Not set	The kind default (below).

That last row of behaviour is the one worth remembering: authoring half a policy on the deck does not silently throw away the other half authored on the zone.

The unauthored defaults#

A deck defaults to Owner seat and host. The posture on hidden information here is fail-closed, so an unowned deck on an ad-hoc table ends up host-only rather than open to the room.
A bag defaults to No one. A bag draws at random by design — that randomness is the mechanism — so browsing one and choosing is against its nature and has to be turned on deliberately.
After search defaults to Shuffle the rest for both.

The "Not set" label names the kind default, not your zone. A deck's dropdown reads Not set (Owner seat and host) even when the Area zone it sits in says something else — the label is the fallback for the kind, and the zone still takes precedence over it at the table. Read the zone's own dropdown to see what an unset pile in it will actually do.

What a search looks like at the table#

The searching player gets a private browse of the pile. Nobody else's screen changes.
The table sees three identity-free lines in the log: the search opening with a count and the pile's name, a line for each card taken, and a line when the session ends. None of them ever names a card.
Closing applies After search. A pile set to shuffle produces an ordinary public "shuffled" line as well.
A session that is never closed expires on its own after five minutes, which is the safety net for a player who disconnects mid-search.
A refused search is refused silently. Someone without permission sees nothing happen and the table is told nothing — announcing the attempt would leak the intent the whole feature protects.

What scripts can and cannot do with it#

A table script can watch a search through DeckObject.onSearched, onSearchPulled and onSearchClosed — and the matching trio on BagObject.

It cannot request one, and it is never told which card was taken. Both limits are deliberate: a script that could open a search could manufacture a private reveal for itself, and a script that could read the pulled card would sidestep the redaction that keeps the pile hidden in the first place.

A mod has no search hook at all. Mods observe a search the way they observe anything else public — the three lines arrive in the ordinary table-event stream, naming the pile and never a card.