Setting up a night
From an empty calendar to a room of checked-in players, in the order you actually do it.
The night itself
A night needs four things: a name, when it starts, which game it is, and the ruleset the engine will pair by. Everything else has a working default, and you can change all of it up until the first pairing.
Pick the ruleset for your game rather than configuring one. It decides the tiebreakers, how many rounds a field of that size plays, and whether the night ends in a cut — so a store never has to know that Swiss at 24 players is five rounds. If your store scores its own way, the scoring table underneath it is yours to change.
A night starts as a draft and nobody can see it. Publishing it puts it on your store page and on the public calendar; making it private keeps it off both and lets you hand out the link yourself.
Getting players in
Players register from the event page without an account. A store can also add somebody at the desk in one field — the search offers people who have played here before, so a regular is two keystrokes rather than a new record every week.
A capacity turns the overflow into a waitlist rather than a refusal, and the waitlist promotes on its own when somebody drops.
Check-in is what puts somebody in the first pairing. Registering is intent; checking in is being in the room, and the difference is the whole reason a no-show is not paired against a player who turned up.
What it costs
An entry fee can be collected at the door or taken online when they register. Taking it online means the desk is not also a till on the night.
A refund follows the drop: somebody who drops before the first pairing gets their money back without you doing anything.
Then you start it
Starting the tournament freezes the ruleset onto the night — including your scoring table and your seating rules. Every round already played was graded by the table it started with, so those settings stop being editable rather than quietly rewriting standings that have already been read out.
Starting it opens the console, which is the surface that runs the night and keeps running with the wifi down.