Keyboard shortcuts

If you play on a computer, a few keys save you a trip to the Menu — and a few more let you tidy your hand without reaching for the mouse. Most of them work while you’re at the board, one works on your games list, and none of them fire while you’re typing a message or renaming yourself, so you can’t set one off by accident.

Getting around

Hold Shift and press a letter. These three go to the same places the Menu button does; there are more Shift shortcuts further down that change the board itself.

Shift + S — show or hide Game scores and settings: the standings, every round played so far, and the game’s rules.
Shift + D — show or hide Display settings: element size, tile colors, columns on screen, sound and theme.
Shift + L — back to your games list. Your game is saved exactly as you left it.

Only one of these panels is open at a time, so pressing Shift + D while the scores are up simply switches you over. Pressing the same combination a second time closes the panel it opened, so the key that got you in also gets you out.

At the board

← and → — scroll between players’ trains when they don’t all fit on screen.
Shift + + and Shift + − — fit one more player column on screen, or one fewer. The same control as Change number of columns on screen in Display settings, and it saves to your account the same way, so the width you settle on follows you to your next game and your other devices. It stops at one column, and at as many columns as the game has.
Shift + F — in a game against the computer, stop waiting between computer moves. Each computer player normally pauses for a couple of seconds so you can see what it did; this skips that. Press it again to bring the pause back, and a notice tells you which way you have just switched it. It changes only how long you wait, never what the computer plays — and it lasts while you stay at the board, so your next game starts with the pauses back.
Esc — let go of a tile you’ve selected, or back out of a confirmation you didn’t mean to open.
Tab — move between tiles and buttons; Enter or Space picks the one you’ve landed on. This is how you can play a whole turn without a mouse.

Tidying your hand

Click a tile in your hand to pick it up, then keep your hands on the keyboard. These need no Shift — a plain letter is enough, because they do nothing at all until a tile is picked up:

R — turn the tile round, swapping its two ends.
A — move it one place to the left.
D — move it one place to the right.

Hold a key down and the tile keeps going, so you can walk it across your hand. The divider moves the same way if you pick that up instead — there is nothing to turn round, so R does nothing to it. See What is the divider tile? if you have not met it.

Prefer the mouse? A tile you have picked up also shows ◀ and ▶ buttons beside Rotate, which do the same thing. They are on every screen size, so you never have to drag a tile into place if you would rather not.

On your games list

One shortcut works before a game exists, on the list of your games:

Shift + N — start a new game. It opens the same box the New Game button does, where you choose between a game you invite friends to and one against the computer. Pressing it again closes the box, so the key that opened it also puts it away.

When they don’t fire

The shortcuts stay out of your way while you’re typing — in a text box, or a dropdown you’ve clicked into. That’s deliberate: without it, renaming yourself to something with an s or a d in it would fling you into a settings panel mid-word.

They’re for computers with a keyboard. On a phone or tablet, use Menu at the bottom of the screen — it goes to all the same places.