Creating & Configuring Events

An event is a single hunt: its schedule, challenges, teams, branding, and live state. Events are created from the Events page (under Operations in the sidebar).

The Create Event form

Click through to Create Event (editing shows Edit Event; the save button is Save Changes, next to Cancel). The form is three cards:

• Event Details — Name (required, placeholder "Enter event name"), Description (rich text), Cover Image (4:3 dropzone), Intro Video.
• Schedule — Start Time and End Time (date picker + time input) and Timezone, with the helper "Wall-clock times for this event are interpreted in this zone".
• Settings — Visibility (Private / Unlisted / Public). When editing, a Status select also appears (Draft / Scheduled / Active / Paused / Completed / Archived) with the caution "Prefer the lifecycle controls on the event page over editing this directly".

A footer note reminds you that logo, colors, and map icons live on the Branding tab, not this form. Editing an event that is already live shows an amber banner: "This event is live. Changing the schedule or status here can disrupt teams in progress…"

Lifecycle & statuses

Events move through six statuses. Transitions are always manual — an admin clicks a button; nothing starts or stops automatically at the scheduled time.

draft → scheduled → active ⇄ paused → completed → archived

The event detail header shows the right buttons for the current status:

Starting an event stamps its actual start time and auto-grants any pre-loaded artifact gadgets to every non-staff team (see Artifacts, Collectibles & Alliances). Ending stamps the actual end time. Success toasts read "Event published/started/… successfully".

Readiness checks

Publish and Start Event run a pre-flight against the same rules that power the "Ready to launch?" checklist card. If any blocking issue exists, a dialog titled "This hunt isn't ready yet" lists what to fix (each item links back into the checklist) with a Got it button.

Blocking errors (stop both Publish and Start):

• No challenges — the event has no challenges at all.
• No starter content — nothing unlocks when the hunt begins.
• Missing answers — a text-answer challenge has a blank answer (puzzles, roadblocks, and minigames are exempt because they're answerless).
• GPS challenges missing coordinates — a GPS-proximity challenge has no location.
• Invalid minigame config — a minigame's configuration doesn't validate.

Warnings (surfaced but don't block):

• Empty groups — a group contains no challenges.
• Map challenges missing coordinates — skipped entirely when Quiz Mode is on (no map, no pins needed).
• QR challenge missing a code — a QR-activation challenge without its code.
• No teams — a warning at Publish time, but promoted to blocking at Start ("someone must play").

Structure is locked once live

Structural changes — adding or removing challenges, creating or deleting groups, changing unlock conditions, reordering — are only allowed while the event is in draft or scheduled status. Once the event is active (or paused/completed), structure is locked so live teams never see the game shift under them.

The Challenges tab shows an amber banner while locked: "This event is {status}. Groups and ordering are locked, but you can still edit challenge content." — you can still fix a typo in a clue or adjust points; you just can't restructure.

Event settings & realtime toggles

Six switches appear both in the Overview tab's Event Info card and in the Live tab's Live settings card. Each shows its current state as text, and changes apply to players in near-real time:

Defaults: Leaderboard, Team Chat, and Help & Support start on; Quiz Mode, AI Photo Verdicts, and Review Before Points start off.

AI cost model

AI photo/video validation is opt-in (the AI Photo Verdicts toggle, off by default) because every verdict calls a vision model and costs tokens. Two things to know about spend:

• Spend is tracked, not capped. Every AI call is logged with its token counts and priced against a model-pricing table — but there is no hard budget limit anywhere in the system. Nothing will automatically switch AI off when a threshold is reached.
• Your levers are the AI Photo Verdicts toggle itself and the event's facilitator mode (hybrid by default, or ai_only / human_only). Turning the toggle off means zero AI spend.

Timing, duration, and timezone

• Start Time / End Time are display and scheduling metadata. They control what players see (countdowns, "Day X of N") and when joining/submitting is allowed relative to the end — but status transitions are always the manual buttons above. There is no auto-start or auto-stop.
• Duration in days: an event can carry a duration (1–365 days) instead of an explicit end; when set together with a Start Time, the End Time is derived as start + N days.
• Timezone (IANA, default UTC) determines where day boundaries fall for multi-day events — it drives the "Day X of N" pill players see on their home screen.

Visibility

Visibility is Private (default), Unlisted, or Public. Note that players never browse events — they always join with a team code (see Teams, Join Codes & QR), so visibility does not gate joining.

The Branding tab

Per-event appearance lives on the Branding tab: event logo (full and small variants), background and accent colors, a custom points label (call points "Doubloons" and every player-facing points surface follows), the Photo Slideshow Interval ("Seconds each photo stays on screen during the post-event slideshow", 2–60 seconds, default 5), per-challenge-type map icons (icon/color overrides by type), plus map behavior switches such as Tap Map Pin to Activate ("Lets teams activate a challenge by tapping its pin on the map. Off by default…" — see Challenge Activation).

The More menu, export, and import

The event detail header has a More overflow menu:

• Display View — the read-only screen for venue TVs/projectors (see Running an Event Live).
• Slideshow — the post-event photo slideshow for the same screens.
• Export — downloads the event as a JSON envelope (current envelope version 1.1; 1.0 is still importable).
• Save as Template — snapshots the event's challenges, groups, stacks, teams, artifacts, and collectibles into a reusable template (see Templates).
• Delete — confirm dialog titled "Delete Event".

On the Events list page, the Import button opens the "Import Event" dialog: upload a previously exported JSON envelope and the whole event — structure, challenges, artifacts, teams (with freshly minted join codes) — is recreated in your organization.