Tournaments Are Here

The tournament data model

Tournaments are live. Under the hood a tournament is a time-boxed competition record: a row that pins a game, a scoring rule, a defined start and end timestamp, and an eligibility scope. It builds directly on the daily-entry primitive we shipped earlier. Where a daily entry is a fixed 24-hour window, a tournament is an arbitrary window with explicit boundaries and stakes attached, so the same scoped-scoring machinery powers both instead of us maintaining a parallel system.

Scores submitted during the window are bucketed against the tournament's identifier, which is what lets a single game host an ongoing daily board and a separate tournament board at the same time without the two contaminating each other. The board is a ranked read over the tournament-scoped score set, served by the same window-and-game composite indexes the leaderboard work added, so ranking a serious field stays cheap.

Scheduling and settlement

Each tournament carries its own schedule. Before the start timestamp it accepts no qualifying entries; between start and end it is open and the live board reflects whatever has been submitted so far; after the end timestamp it settles. Settlement freezes the ranking: the board stops accepting new scores into the tournament bucket and the final standings become the record of record for that competition. Because eligibility and timing live on the tournament row rather than in client logic, the server is the single authority on whether a given submission counts, which closes the door on a client claiming a score after the clock ran out.

Why time-boxing over timers

Every free-to-play game faces the same question: how do you get people back tomorrow. The industry answer for fifteen years was to take something away, cap lives, drain energy, gate the next level behind a wait or a wallet. We think that is both cynical and beatable. A tournament pulls you back because a contest is running and you might win it, not because we degraded your experience to manufacture urgency. For creators, a tournament wrapped around a game turns raw plays into a moment the feed amplifies, and that attention flows back to the person who built it.