How to Host a Casual Game

Hosting a game on Find a Game lets you put a casual session on the public board and have other players come to you. You pick the venue, date, format, and level, and the platform handles the rest — slots, joins, messaging, and the calendar invite.

Before You Start

There are a few things you need to be eligible to host:

You're 18 or over. Player-hosted casual games are adults-only in v1 for safeguarding reasons. If you're a club coach or committee member running a session for juniors, do that through your club's club-hosted listing — see Publishing open sessions to Find-a-Game.
Your email is verified. Same gate we use for sensitive actions across the platform — it stops fake hosts.
You have fewer than three active games. You can host up to three games at any one time. Mark older ones complete or cancelled to free a slot.

Creating a Game

Go to /me/games and tap Host a game — or open /me/games/new directly.
Fill in the form:

- Title (optional) — a short name like "Tuesday doubles". If you leave it blank we'll auto-generate one.

- Venue name and postcode — required, used for the map pin and distance filtering.

- Date, start time, end time.

- Format — Singles, Doubles, or Mixed.

- Level range — minimum and maximum self-rated level you're hoping for. Be honest; it helps people self-select in or out.

- Slots — total players you need, including yourself. Defaults to 4 for doubles, 2 for singles.

- Cost per head (optional) — court hire split, shuttles, etc. Stripe split-pay is on the roadmap; for now you collect on the night.

- Notes — kit, parking, anything specific to the venue.

Tap Publish. You'll land on the game's detail page.

You're automatically added as the first participant — no need to "join" your own game.

Age Policy

Player-hosted games are adults only in v1. The form locks the age policy to adults-only and shows a tooltip explaining why. Under-18 accounts can't see or join your game.

If you want to run a session that includes juniors, talk to your club committee about publishing it as a club-hosted session — those follow the club's own age policy.

Managing Slots

Once players start joining, the game card on /find-a-game updates in real time. When the last slot fills:

The game's status flips to Full automatically.
It still shows on the public list (with a Full badge) but the Join button is disabled.
You and other participants get a notification.

You can lower the slot count up to the number already filled, but you can't drop below it. To take more players, raise the slot count and the game reopens.

Editing After Publishing

After publishing you can still tweak:

Title
Notes
Slot count (subject to the rule above)
Level range

The date, venue, and format are locked once published — if any of those change, cancel the game and post a new one. That's deliberate: people who joined did so on the basis of those details, and silently changing them is a poor experience.

Cancelling a Game

Plans fall apart. To cancel:

Open the game on /me/games (Hosting tab).
Tap Cancel game.
Confirm — you'll be asked for an optional reason, which is sent to participants.

All joined participants are notified by email and in-app. The game stays on /me/games under Past as a cancelled record.

Heads up — reliability impact: cancelling more than 6 hours before the start time has no effect on your reliability score. Cancelling within 6 hours docks the score, because at that point participants are unlikely to find an alternative. Try to give as much notice as you can.

Marking a Game Complete

Once the game has actually happened (after end time), tap Mark complete on the game page. This:

Moves the game to your Past tab.
Lets us count it toward your reliability score.
Unlocks any post-game features in later waves (career stats, ratings — coming).

If you forget, the game still moves to Past automatically a few days after the end time, but marking it complete is the cleanest signal.

Reliability Score

Your reliability score is a simple summary of how dependable you are as a host: did games go ahead, were they cancelled at short notice, did you turn up. We compute it nightly.

A few things to know:

It's only shown publicly after you've hosted 5+ completed games. New hosts have no badge — that's fine, we don't want to penalise people for being new.
Late cancellations and no-shows hurt it. Plenty-of-notice cancellations don't.
Joiners' behaviour doesn't affect your score. If a joiner pulls out last minute, that's on them, not on you.

Aim to host games you're confident you'll run, give participants notice if anything changes, and your score will look after itself.

Tips for a Good Host

Be specific about level. "Doubles, club-level upwards" gets you a better turnout than "all welcome".
Use the notes for parking, court access, what to bring, costs — anything that saves a message.
Reply in the message thread. Participants will ask the obvious questions (parking, kit, time). Answering once in the thread saves repeating yourself.
Mark complete promptly. It feeds your reliability score and tidies up your Hosting tab.

How to find and join a game
Set up your play profile
Publishing open sessions to Find-a-Game (for committees)