Run a session

This is the full happy path for hosting a game, start to finish.

1. Pick a game

Open the GM console and choose a game from the library. Each game shows its name, a short abstract, the recommended player count, and whether it supports bots. The eleven built-in games are described in the Game catalog.

2. Create the session

Creating a session spins up a live game on the server and gives you a four-letter join code (like SHON). Share that code with your players — read it aloud, text it, put it on a screen. Anyone with the code and the app can join.

The join dialog also shows a QR code and a share link (app.wage.games/join/SHON). Players who scan it with the app installed jump straight into the app with the code pre-filled; everyone else lands on a page showing the code with an open-in-app button.

Players can join before or after you place the map; they’ll just wait on the map screen until you start.

3. Place the map

Every game ships with its zones authored in abstract meters. Your job is to drop them onto a real-world location:

Find your park/field/campus on the map.
Place each placeable zone — usually you drag a default shape to where you want it, and you can move, rotate, and resize it to fit the space.
Child zones move with their parent. Many games (Capture the Flag, King of the Hill, Pirate’s Booty) are a single placeable zone with bases, hills, or ships nested inside — place the parent and the whole layout drops in together.

A game won’t start until every required zone is placed and has geometry. See Placing zones for the details and common mistakes.

4. (Optional) Tune bots and items

If the game declares bots, how many exist is part of the game’s design — each bot class declares a starting count and spawns into its home zone at game start. When the game marks the count tunable, the Game panel shows a knob so you can scale the population (before or during the game), alongside other tunables like speed.

You can also spawn items into zones if you want to seed the field manually, and adjust per-class or per-bot settings. See Bots, items, and tunables.

5. Start the game

Hit Start. The engine runs a pre-flight checklist and refuses to start until it passes:

every placeable/required zone is placed and has shapes,
every required point exists,
the human player count is within the game’s min/max,
zone area constraints (if any) are satisfied, and
every bot class’s (and the demo policy’s) home zone is placed.

If start is blocked, the console tells you exactly what’s missing. Once it passes, the game status flips to started, any start-of-game setup runs (role assignments, countdowns), items spawn, bots take position, and the tick loop begins.

6. Spectate and manage

While the game runs you get a live, unfiltered view: every player’s position, items on the field, and a running event log of what the rules are doing. You can:

Watch and narrate — you see everything, including players the game hides from each other.
Use chat — your messages appear to players as Gamemaster.
Pause / resume — pausing freezes the rules (and the countdown clock) so you can fix the map or wait for stragglers; resuming rolls the clock forward so the visible time-remaining doesn’t jump.
Stop — halt the session.
End — finish the game and disconnect players.

Many games end on their own — a countdown expires, a team is eliminated, or a win condition fires — and broadcast a game-over to everyone.

7. After the game

You can start another session of the same game, or pick a different one. When the engine is backed by a database, your sessions are saved automatically and turn up in the saved-sessions library below; otherwise they live only in memory and expire after a long idle period. For the full state model — what survives a reload, what pause does — see Session lifecycle.

8. Saved sessions and replays

If your engine has persistence configured, the Library overlay shows a Saved sessions list of your past games, newest first. Each row names the game and shows its join code, status (set up, in progress, or ended), and how long ago it was active. Three controls sit on each row:

Resume — reopen a saved session and drop straight back into its map. It’s the same as reconnecting to a live game; a session that was mid-play comes back paused, so hit Start (or resume) when you’re ready. The button reads Active and is disabled for the session you already have open.
Replay — play back a recorded game (see below).
Delete — permanently remove the session and its replay history. The console asks you to confirm first, and if you delete the session you’re currently running, it’s torn down too.

Replaying a game

Choosing Replay loads a finished session’s recorded history and opens a scrubber bar at the bottom of the map. Use the play/pause button to run the timeline, drag the slider to jump to any moment, and watch the clock to see elapsed time. Players and items are reconstructed frame by frame using the same view you get live. Hit the × to exit replay. If a session was never played (no frames were recorded), there’s nothing to replay and the console says so.