Leagues: a season for your game, run by the players

Why this, now

Everything we built so far needed other people to already be there: a table needs players nearby, a community needs members, a seek needs someone to answer it. With few users there was little reason to post anything, and with little posted there was little reason to come back. That loop ran against us.

So the roadmap for this season is two bets that pay off for the first person who uses them, with nobody else on the site yet:

1. Post once, and every other channel follows. For the people who already run things — community hosts, café staff, club organizers — tableport should be the easiest place to keep what is happening up to date, and never "one more channel to maintain". Plan an event here and it is posted to your Telegram, your Discord, your calendar and your website, with a ready-made image for Instagram and Facebook. That is useful to one organizer on day one, and every event they post is content that was not on the site before.

2. Content that exists nowhere else. A drop-in league — nights you can walk into, a season that counts every game, a rating that follows you — is something no café can run on a spreadsheet and no other site offers. The first one is a Catan league in Helsinki. If it works for one café it is the same software for the next, for any game, and the league's standings and history are a reason to come back that does not depend on who else is online tonight.

The rest of this page is what those two bets need.

The final

When a season's qualification closes, the top 16 eligible players are invited to the final. Eligible means at least six counted games (two nights or so); the host sets the number. Every invitation has a date to confirm by; a seat that is declined or left unanswered passes to the next player in the standings, so the final is played by the people who earned it and showed up. On the day, any seat still empty goes to the reserve players present at the venue, in standings order.

The final is a proper tournament: four preliminary tables, three games, one final table — under the official rules of the game if the league wants.

• Exists today Qualification close, the top of the standings as qualifiers, a final whose door reads the qualifier list.
• Next Minimum games, invitations with a confirm-by, the reserve.

Your stats

The season page shows every player's rank, points, games, wins, average place and rating; your profile shows your rating, games, wins and best finishes per game, across every league you have played in. Everything is computed from the games that were actually played and confirmed.

• Next Standings detail and profile stats.
• Later Leaderboards by city and country, based on where you played.

Rooms that end when the season does

A league has an announcement channel in its community. Each season has its own chat for the people who actually played a night in it, and each night has its own. When a night or a season is over, its room leaves your chat list but stays readable from the page, so your list is only the rooms that are alive.

• Exists today Night chats, archived after the night.
• Next Season chats.

For venues: your website, our register

Your site lists the events; tableport holds the registrations, cancellations, waitlist and results, so one place always has the whole picture. Paste one snippet into your event page and it shows the live count and a sign-up button; paste another and your upcoming events list stays current without editing. A public example store shows every embed and how it looks.

• Exists today Link cards and event metadata for every public activity.
• Next Embeddable event card and upcoming-events list; the example store.
• Later Public calendar and JSON feeds for a venue's events.

Where this stands

The first league is a Catan league in Helsinki, piloted with a game café this winter: a few trial nights as Season 0, then a first full season on weekday evenings. Everything above marked [next] is being built for that season, in the order a night needs it: check-in and offers, then results and scoring, then the final.

Tell us what is missing: hello@tableport.gg.