Your first tournament
The guided setup walks through the tournament in one pass. Answers save asynchronously to a draft; teams, groups, venues and fixtures are created during the final setup operation. You can revisit earlier steps before finishing.
You will need: your dates, your venues and how many pitches each has, and your team list. The team list is the only part worth preparing in advance.
The steps
The first screen offers Start from scratch and Use sample. The example fills the steps with an editable Reykjavík Spring Cup. Saved templates and manual creation remain separate entry points; expand the optional help for an explanation of the manual route.
Format. Pick the sport first: it determines the suggested formats, default match length and entrant terminology. Three primary format families lead the screen. Choose the selected format’s duration below them; expand its day structure to inspect the stages. More formats exposes advanced choices and the custom builder. Choosing a format explains the options.
For a Swiss pool, Rounds sets how many rounds each team plays. Once you have added teams, the note under it gives the most your field allows — for example Maximum 5 rounds across your categories without rematches. Ask for more and the wizard says so plainly: four teams meet every opponent once in three rounds, so a fourth round means some teams play each other again. Choose Allow rematches to keep your rounds — once everyone has met, the draw starts again from round 1 — or the button that plays the rounds that fit, such as Play 3 rounds. The same note appears under the team list on Teams & categories and again on Ready, and if Finish still meets it, either button carries setup on with that choice. You can also tick Allow rematches under Rounds in advance; it applies to rounds drawn before the tournament. Whichever way the rounds are drawn, teams from the same club are kept apart where the field allows; the card says so under Draw each round from the results so far.
Tournament basics. Name, location and dates. The name becomes part of the public URL, so pick the one people will search for. Location is optional: start typing a town, venue or area and pick from the suggestions. Date guidance is available in an expandable help section.
Teams & categories. The step reads top to bottom, one numbered section at a time, and opens on How do your teams get in? Choose one of three ways in:
- Import a spreadsheet. A Google Sheet or an Excel file; FairGame maps the columns. This is the fastest route for anything over about twenty teams. A connected Google Sheet can be synced again later, and only the differences are applied. Picked the wrong one? Change sheet or Change file on the import card clears it, and the teams it added, so you can start over.
- Add them manually. Type in your categories, then your teams.
- Let clubs register their own teams. You skip the team list. The next section asks Who registers, and who pays? Once answered, it collapses to a one-line summary that includes what it costs you — for example You pay per team · your organization's first tournament is free. If clubs or participants pay, they register and pay through your link. When you finish, the tournament opens for registration and you share the link. See registration and fees and payments.
With teams in — typed, or imported from the sheet — the sections continue in the order you decide them: Categories, then for formats with groups Group size and Seeding, and last Teams in groups.
For formats with groups, each category shows how its teams split. Target teams per group changes the size and re-draws the groups the wizard drew for you at once; a category whose groups differ from that split — imported, hand-arranged, or a team short — is shown as kept as arranged, and Re-draw with its name replaces it, after a confirm when hand-arranged groups would be lost. Teams added once the groups are full wait under Unassigned, and the button above them re-draws that category into enough groups. Give each team a Strength where you can — a spreadsheet's strength column fills it in: when strengths differ, groups are drawn with teams of similar strength together. Teams from the same club are put in different groups wherever the strengths allow. Categories and groups explains the draw.
In Teams in groups — Roster for a format without groups — every category is its own card, listed alphabetically — 5.kk A, 5.kk B, 5.kk C — whatever order you added the categories in, with its team count and its groups, strengths and Unassigned list. The tournament keeps that order. Drag a team by its handle to another group, back to Unassigned, or into another category: drop it on that category's groups or list, or on its name while its card is closed. A category that already has a team of the same name keeps it, and the dragged team stays where it was. On a phone, a team's move control puts it in another group of the same category. With more than 100 teams or three categories, the cards start closed, showing each category's name and team count, and a filter narrows the board by team or category name.
Clubs. FairGame suggests club links so crests and contacts can follow the correct teams. A single team uses a direct assignment row; clubs with multiple teams retain their grouped sections. Unmatched teams and links needing review come first. Review guessed matches before confirming one club or all suggestions. Club search, reassignment and creating unmatched clubs remain available. The roster filter appears from 12 teams; above 24, multi-team club sections start collapsed.
Venues. One entry per site, with its number of pitches. You can name individual pitches here — Hall A, Laugardalsvöllur — or leave them numbered and rename them later. Playing time, the break between matches and the playing hours per day sit on the same step; the wizard shows the slot they add up to (12 min play + 3 min break = kick-offs every 15 min), and that break becomes the tournament's setting under Settings → Schedule & format. The same row asks for the minimum rest between a team's matches, one match length unless you change it. A pre-drawn Swiss pool asks for Rest between matches (rounds) instead, one round unless you change it: a round is as long as the pool takes to play one, so the same number fits every category whatever its match length. FairGame suggests a pitch count from the busiest day — the matches it will generate for your teams and format, times the slot length, divided by the usable hours one pitch gives — and shows that arithmetic next to the suggestion so you can check it. If your format draws adaptive Swiss rounds, which kick off in waves, the note also says when your category sizes cannot keep every pitch busy — only 11 of 12 pitches can be in play at once — and the estimate counts only those. Each venue is a compact row. Expand its pitch-name section to name individual pitches; existing custom names open that section automatically. Pitch count, removal, all timing fields and capacity guidance remain available.
Ready. A plain statistics row and compact settings summary show what will be created. The applicable price and conditional warnings stay visible. Expand the optional next-step help for background information. Check these figures before finishing:
- Matches (est.) — the count Finish will generate, with the group stage and the knockout shown separately.
- Pitch time needed — the playing time the busiest day needs per pitch, against the hours you have: 2.5 h of 8.0 h fits comfortably, 9.5 h of 8.0 h does not. On a tournament of more than one day the label reads Pitch time needed (busiest day). When the day does not fit, the figure turns amber and a note below the row says what the day needs, what it has and how to make room: extend the day, add pitches or shorten matches. Back to Venues takes you to those settings. You can still finish, but automatic scheduling will leave the matches that do not fit without a time.
- Registration — who adds the teams and who pays. If you pay per team, it reads You add the teams (clubs don't pay).
What you get at the end
Finishing creates the tournament, its categories and groups, its venues and pitches, and generates the fixtures. An adaptive Swiss pool is the exception: Finish lays out every round's kickoff times, and the opponents and pitches are drawn before each round — see adaptive rounds. Finish setup shows how far it has got: a progress bar, the step in hand with its count — Creating teams · 120 of 512 — and, for a roster of more than 200 teams, how long to expect, for example 512 teams take about 2 minutes to set up. After twenty seconds a Still working line adds the time elapsed, so a long roster does not look stuck. Keep the tab open until the dashboard opens.
If the draw has something worth knowing first — a Swiss pool whose opponents span more than one strength band, a category with no strengths to seed from, or an adaptive pool whose rounds did not all fit in your pitch time — a short note appears before you go on. A pool short of pitch time is named with its count, 7fl kvk eldri: only 4 of its 6 rounds fit in the pitch time; the rest have no kickoff, and told what to change: add pitches or pitch time, shorten the matches or the break, or play fewer rounds, then apply the format again. Open venues takes you straight to the venues page to do that; Go to the tournament continues to the dashboard.
You land in the admin app on the Summary page: a checklist of what is set up and what is still to do, with scheduling as the next step. A category whose matches do not all exist yet — that adaptive pool short of rounds, or one nobody generated fixtures for — keeps Place matches on the schedule open and is counted there as 1 category short of matches until you fix it. (A setup with nothing left but publishing opens straight on the Schedule page instead.)
The tournament is a draft: it is not public and nobody outside your organisation can see it. Publishing is a separate, deliberate step you take when the schedule is ready — see publishing the schedule.
Use sample on the first screen fills the setup with an example tournament — the Reykjavík Spring Cup, with its categories, teams, groups and venues. Walk through the steps, finish, and you have a complete draft to try the scheduling on. You can delete it afterwards.
If you leave halfway
After the first screen, answers save in the background to a draft. Save & exit waits for the latest answers to save before returning to the tournament list. If saving fails, the wizard stays open with an error so you can retry. On the first screen, before a draft exists, edited answers are backed up on this device instead. Closing the browser tab or leaving through another route during a pending or failed save can still lose recent changes.
If the final handoff fails after setup has been created, Try again resumes that final step in the open wizard without creating the setup again.
Use Resume setup on the draft in the tournament list, or Resume on the unfinished-setup notice. Resuming restores the last successfully saved answers, which may be older than the screen you left. Discard removes the draft and its saved answers.
Doing it again next year
Once you have run a tournament, Clone on the tournament list is the fastest start: the settings, days, venues, pitches, categories and groups come across, and you add this year's teams. A template does the same for a shape you want to reuse across events, and can be shared with other organisations. The tournament list compares the two.
Open Settings in the wizard header to change language or choose Light, Dark or System appearance without leaving setup.