Far Table on Mac and Windows

Far Table runs on a Mac or a Windows machine as a real desktop app, not a blown-up phone screen. The game is identical. The chrome is not.

The desktop layout switches on because the app is running on macOS or Windows, not because a window happens to be wide. Resizing a window never moves you between the two layouts. Linux is not supported.

What does not change

• Same campaigns, same file format. A campaign authored on a Mac and one authored on a phone are the same thing.
• Same session model. The DM hosts, players join, the DM's device is still the source of truth. A desktop DM with phone players is a normal table, and so is the reverse.
• Same data behaviour. Nothing syncs to a cloud. What you author on a machine stays there until you move it. Chapter 32, Moving a Campaign to Another Device, covers how.
• Same dice rule. Dice are photographed, never generated. A computer has no useful camera for that, so a desktop borrows a paired phone. See chapter 34, Pairing Your Phone.

The combat toolbar

On a phone the combat map's tools live in small floating bars that come and go. On desktop they are gathered into one toolbar spanning the top of the map, which stays put for the whole fight.

Both hats get the map tools there: Target, Rangefinder, AOE, Draw, and Trash.

Wearing the player hat, you also get a Move button, which opens the same movement and Dash request flow described in chapter 24, Playing Your Turn. You get none of the DM controls below.

Wearing the DM hat, you get no Move button, because as DM you reposition a token by plain clicking. Instead the toolbar adds:

• A Scale and Lighting pair that shows the map's current scale and fog state and opens their menus.
• A dice button for the DM's own theatre rolls.
• Before the fight, Start Combat and End Encounter.
• Once the fight is live, an Add menu offering Monster and Player token.

If the window is narrow, the tool cluster scrolls sideways rather than wrapping, so nothing disappears when you drag the window smaller.

The side column

Desktop keeps a fixed column beside the map, always visible, never overlapping it. A chevron toggle over the map collapses and expands the column, and that choice carries across between combat and exploration, so setting it once is enough.

During combat the column holds the initiative order. It is the same tracker described in chapter 22, The Combat Tracker: same cards, same statuses, same rules about who may touch what. Only the placement differs. End Turn sits at the top of the column, and for the DM End Combat sits at the bottom.

Wearing the player hat in combat, the column also carries five action buttons that live behind a floating dice menu on a phone: To Hit, Damage, Roll Check, Initiative, and End Turn. With no paired phone, that row is hidden, because no roll can be photographed.

Outside combat, on the exploration map, the same column holds the pin tools. Wearing the DM hat, that is a strip of five tabs: Note, Encounter, Photo, Clue, and Navigation. Wearing the player hat, you get a compact Note tab and a dice button, the same DM-only limits mobile applies.

Who sees that column at all:

• The DM always sees it, including when working alone on a campaign with no session running.
• A player sees it only during a live session. A player browsing a campaign offline gets the full-width map and no column, because that view is read-only.

One desktop-only extra sits in the DM's pin tools. Switch the Photo tab's source from Photos to Bestiary and you get a grid of monster art. Drag a piece of it onto the map to drop a pin carrying that monster's plate image. Asset thumbnails in that column scroll vertically rather than sideways, the sensible shape for a tall narrow column.

Floating panels, and right-click

Two smaller differences worth knowing:

• Panels float instead of docking. On a phone the Unified Combatant Panel covers the bottom of the screen and hides the tab bar. On desktop it is a draggable window over the map with a drag handle and a close button, and the tab bar stays visible behind it. It comes and goes with your token selection, opens clear of the side column, and does not remember where you dragged it last time.
• Right-click does what a long press does on a phone: priming a combatant for placement, opening a pin cluster, opening an Atlas item's manage menu, toggling a map tooltip, committing a press-pick on a map. Wherever this manual says long-press, read right-click.