September Update: The Cellar, One Front Door, and a TV That Runs the Room

Most of what shipped on Brainflood since August is about the same twenty minutes: the ones before doors, when a host is still building the night instead of working the room. Here is the rundown of what is live on app.brainflood.com today, including the console rebuilds and the tip button that landed with the same deploy.

The Cellar: 117 smart question packs

The question library was a very good filing cabinet: 13,000+ questions, fifteen categories, a search box. Going from "I need a Halloween round" to a loaded game still meant scrolling. The Cellar fixes that. It is a browsable pack library at Library > The Cellar with 117 packs on 13 shelves: decades, fandoms, pub classics, seasonal, and Full Night bundles that run a whole evening as four rounds of ten.

A pack is a rule, not a fixed list. "Every 80s question tagged music" is a rule, so a question we add next month joins the pack on its own. That is also why the Tonight rail works: Halloween packs surface in October and un-feature themselves in November without anyone remembering to do it.

• Search covers the pack name, its blurb and its tags. "1980s", "80s" and "eighties" all land on the same packs.
• Pick a pack while building a round and it fills the round for you. A pack draw never repeats an answer, and it skips questions you used in your last ten games.
• A Brainpardy board column can be backed by a pack under your own label ("Chart Toppers" from the 80s pack), and it re-draws fresh clues every time you launch the board.
• Trivia Bingo draws from packs too, with answers short enough to fit a card square.

A pack is a rule, not a list. New questions join on their own.

One front door: Create

Seven kinds of night (game, karaoke, Pick'em, tournament, poll, slideshow, ticker) used to have seven starting points. Now there is one Create screen. Pick the kind, build it, done. The default action stands alone on the page; presets and your saved templates live behind a "start from a template" drawer, so the screen is not a wall of equal cards. The Event Builder, where you describe the night in plain English, is a mode of the same screen.

The standalone game designer shell is retired. The same round timeline, live previews and question tools now live inside Create, and the old page just forwards you there.

The show board

The host dashboard is now one screen that answers "what is happening now". A lamp when a game is live. The next scheduled night. A start rail (Create, Build an event, Practice). Your most-used templates on tap, one click each. And the plan and usage ledger, so you know where the month stands without opening billing.

The TV is the host

This one is for the room. The projector now narrates the night instead of forty phones doing it badly.

• Names pop on the big screen as people join, and the lobby shows a live roster.
• The question screen shows a phone cue ("Pick your answer on your phone") and a live count: "5 of 8 answered".
• When a TV is connected, the Auto Host voice plays through it, not through every phone at once. Subtitles show either way.
• The join page is one job: name, team, Join. Sign-in and watch-only moved to quiet footer links.
• First-time players get a short intro card before an unfamiliar round type (bluff, wagers, lightning, Brainpardy, bingo, Name That Tune). Plain trivia skips it.
• Phones stay awake through the scoring break. Projectors do too.

Print Center

Everything printable is in one hub at Business > Print Center: certificates and results posters for after the night, picture rounds and the paper game pack for during it, event posters with an RSVP QR and business-card QR hand-outs for before, and tip signage for the bar (a foldable table tent, a poster, or cut-out cards, each with a scannable code per payment app). Names, dates and codes fill themselves in.

On tips, the rule has not changed and will not: the QR opens your own Venmo, Cash App, PayPal or Zelle. Brainflood never touches the money.

Every rule, one tap away

Every game mode has a public rules page at app.brainflood.com/help/games with numbered "how it works" figures. Inside Create, every significant option carries a hover hint and a "?" that deep-links to the exact rule. No more guessing what Fairness mode does before you flip it on.

For players

Two older features are worth repeating because they keep getting missed. Daily Practice lets any logged-in player run a real Auto-hosted game against bots any time, three a day free, plus one shared Daily Challenge with a leaderboard. And the BS Bureau is the platform home for your Brainflood Score: profile, index, bling shelf, and a daily reading.

Also live today

These landed in the same deploy, so they are on app.brainflood.com right now.

• Tip your host, everywhere. One quiet button on the player phone at natural pauses: the trivia game-over screen, the singer phone, the Pick'em standings once the night ends. It opens the payment app straight to the host's handle. A host switch turns it off for venues that do not allow tipping.
• Rebuilt consoles. The live trivia console, the KJ dashboard and the Pick'em host console each got a cleaner header, one line per player with inline score steppers, and the venue display controls in one place.
• Slideshow reorder and import. Drag slide tabs to reorder, and pull slides from any of your other decks with live thumbnails.
• Live team list on the join page. The first table's new team shows up for everyone still on the join screen, no refresh.

If you run a night on any of this, tell us what broke or what you wish it did. The Platform News thread in the forum is the place, or support@brainflood.com.

- The Brainflood Devs

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