Hidden Areas for Players

What is a Hidden Area?

Hidden areas are zones where content is hidden from everyone except its owner.
They can be used for hiding secret information, taking a random card from another player, revealing a card to your ally while keeping it secret from others, or just as a supplement to your hand.
Hidden areas can be locked, moved, and rotated just like other game components. Only the owner can unlock and move their hidden area.

Using a Hidden Area

When you hover a cursor on a hidden area – you will see a special symbol near your cursor:

Hidden Area in Oceans: the blue player’s view – red components are hidden for the blue player.

You can reveal your hidden area by clicking F on it, or hover the cursor, click the right mouse button, and choose Show content from the radial menu. The eye icon near the cursor is now without strikethrough. In the example below, the revealed side of the area itself also has the same icon on it.

Blue player’s view, Red player reveals their hidden area.

Passing Your Hidden Area to Another Player

Hidden areas can be bound to a seat of particular color. Players can detach hidden areas from their seat during the game and attach them to another one. A seat can have more than one hidden area.

Moreover, hidden areas make card drafting or any other form of components exchange much easier as well. In The Isle of Cats from now on every player has a hidden zone attached to their color. When you need to pass your hand of cards to another player, simply put them into your hidden area and then attach it to another player through the round menu. That player will be able to see the cards now and can also move the zone closer to their player area if needed. Similarly, another player may reveal their hidden area to you so that you take one card into your hand and pass it further.

To pass (e.g. when drafting)  your hidden area to a particular player:

Hover the cursor on the hidden area, click the right mouse button, click Attach to seat from the round menu and choose that player’s color.

The Isle of Cats. The red player’s view. The player can see own hidden area and the amount of components in the blue player’s hidden area.

After choosing cards, the red player attached their hidden area to the blue player:

The blue player’s view. Now they can see own hidden area and the red player’s hidden area.

If the game rules allow that, you can see the quantity of objects in a hidden area of another player. A number will appear near the cursor when hovering over the area. If there is no number, it means that this function has been disabled for this game because the information is secret. Similarly, if you are allowed to take a random object from a hidden area of another player, you will be able to do so by clicking and dragging from that hidden area or via the right click menu.

Hidden areas can be a handy alternative to a player’s hand. For instance, in deck building games like Hero Realms you can simply lay out your cards in your player area instead of every time taking them into hand and then placing back onto the table:

Only the blue player can see open cards in the blue hidden area.