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.

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) Add bots and items

If the game supports bots, you can add them from the Bots panel — useful to fill out a thin group or to demo a game solo. You can set how many and adjust tunables like their speed. Some games require a minimum number of bots; the console tells you.

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
bot minimums are met.

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. Sessions are held in memory and expire after a long idle period, so a forgotten session cleans itself up. For the full state model — what survives a reload, what pause does — see Session lifecycle.