Ten days ago a stranger in Hanoi found a Brainflood rules page through a chatbot answer, signed up, poked around for forty minutes, and left. They never met a bug. They met five small seams that only a first-timer would notice, and one big one: the Free plan on this website did not actually exist inside the app. Everything below is what we fixed, plus what else landed in September.
The Free plan is real
For months this site said "sign up free, no credit card", and the pricing table showed a Free tier. Inside the app, the only thing that ever made you a host was a paid checkout. A fresh account was a player with no way into the host tools. That is fixed. Register, press Start hosting free, and you land on the host dashboard with a setup wizard. No card, no trial clock.
- 3 games a month at one venue, 8 teams and up to 30 players a game.
- Every game mode and the full 13,000+ question library, plus 50 questions of your own, 3 packs and 3 saved templates.
- A Brainflood watermark on the TV. That is the only thing you pay to remove at the next step up.
- Upgrade from the plan page when a night outgrows it. Cancel a paid plan and you are back on Free, not locked out.
Free means you can run a real Tuesday on it. Three of them a month.
Sign in with a link
The login page has a second way in: Email me a sign-in link. We send a one-time link that works for 15 minutes and signs you in on whatever device you open it on. Opening it also verifies your address, so a brand-new account never has to find the verification mail first, which is exactly what our visitor from Hanoi tried and failed to skip. The link never burns itself when a mail scanner peeks at it; only the page you land on does. Google sign-in still works, and Apple sign-in is on the list for when there is an iPhone app to put it in.
The first ten minutes
Hosts get a four-step start: your name and photo as players will see them, a demo game with its join link, your tip links (Venmo, Cash App, PayPal, Zelle, shown on every phone and the TV at game over), then share. Hosts past the wizard get the same nudges on the dashboard checklist. Players get a small "three things worth doing first" strip: add a photo, get your Brainflood Score, play a practice game. And the profile page, which held photo, bio and links all along, is finally a real page in the menu instead of a link nobody found.
Practice: pick a topic
Daily Practice now takes a topic. History, geography, science, music, movies and TV, sports, food and drink, thirteen in all. Pick one and the game draws from it first. The first time you play on a device, a short card says how it works, because a solo game starts the moment you press Play and the clock is honest. And the Daily Challenge no longer records a zero for someone who opened it and never tapped an answer; the day stays open, and only real attempts make the board.
Karaoke: singers answer trivia on their phones
The Name That Tune round between singers used to be answered by the KJ reading the room. Now every singer in the queue gets the question on their own phone, the TV shows the question and a live "4 of 7 answered" tally, and the winner takes the Priority Pass and jumps the queue. A phone that shows up mid-round joins in, and a reload never re-offers a question you already locked in.
KJs also get a real quick trivia game over the set: pick a preset (mixed, music, Name That Tune, picture, true or false), pick how many questions, or hand-pick from the packs. It opens in its own tab, the TV plays it, and "Return now" brings the singer queue back.
The Bureau in the room
Your Brainflood Score rank now rides along wherever the room sees your name: the TV roster as people join, the host lobby, and a "your table's BS" panel at game over with a compare link for anyone whose file is public. A projector that connects after the night ended shows the ending instead of an empty lobby, which sounds small until it is the one you are looking at.
Tell us what broke
Every host, admin and community page has a small Report a problem button at the bottom left. It files your note with the page, browser and build attached, mails us, and lands in a queue we actually look at. If you are one of the first venues on the platform, this is the button we want you to press.
Under the hood
- Rate limits on the join rush and the phone heartbeat were raised for the way a bar actually works: forty phones behind one Wi-Fi address, all at once.
- The help pages a search engine or a chatbot lands you on now have a way in, top and bottom.
- Google sign-in got its branding, the sitemap got its image markup right, and automated checks run on every push again.
What is next
Passkeys once there are enough accounts to want them, the report button on player phones mid-game, and a "how did the night go" summary for hosts after each game. 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
Want to run the night?
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