Questions

Before you start

What is Fayla?

A scoreboard, a secret-mission game and an awards ceremony for a weekend away. You build the event beforehand — challenges, games, missions, trophies, a plan — and on the weekend you run it from your phone while everybody else watches it on theirs.

Does everybody need to sign up?

No. Only the person building it ever has an account, and that is a link in an email rather than a password. Everybody else taps the link you send them, taps their name, and they are in. No app, no store, nothing to install.

What kinds of event is it for?

A stag or bachelor party, a hen or bachelorette, a big birthday, a work away-day, a family reunion, or something with kids in it. Each one is the same product in its own words, with the parts that do not suit it switched off — a kids’ event cannot turn drinking on at all.

Can I try it before I build anything?

Yes. There is a sample weekend running at demo.fayla.party with a made-up group in it, half played through, and you can poke at every screen of it.

Can two of us build it together?

Yes. Invite somebody and they can change what the event is carrying, reword any of the rules, say what the venue has and put names in. Publishing it and handing out the links stay with whoever started it.

What it costs

Is there a free version?

Yes, and it is a real one: 10 people, one event running at a time, and the core of the game. Photographs and the memories board are kept for 30 days after the event closes.

What do the paid tiers get?

Party is €49, one event, no cap on how many people are in it, every switch available, and everything kept for a year after it closes. Planner is €19 a month for somebody running several a year, and Business is €99 a month for a company that needs an invoice. On those two, nothing is deleted on a clock at all.

When do I pay?

Not yet — nothing here charges anybody, so everything is free while it is being finished. Leave your address and you will hear when that changes.

On the weekend

What actually happens on the night?

You release a challenge when the room suits it, award the points, spin the forfeit wheel, reveal who did their secret mission. Everybody else sees the scoreboard move on their own phone. On the way home you close it out and everybody gets the record of it.

What is a secret mission?

A thing one person is quietly given to do, worth points if nobody catches them. Nobody can see anybody else’s — not the other players and not whoever is running it, until the end. That is enforced by the software rather than by everybody behaving, which is why a mission needs the link that was sent to you personally rather than just tapping your name.

Somebody lost their link. Now what?

Make them a new one from the builder. It is a button of its own because it signs their old phone out of its own missions, which is the one thing you would not want to do by accident.

Does it need signal?

It needs enough to sync. Every action a phone sends carries a key, and sending the same one twice changes nothing, so a tap in a basement that arrives late arrives once. Nudges to everybody’s phone are a separate thing and an iPhone only allows them once the app is on the home screen — the app says so rather than pretending it cannot do it.

Can I change the wording of a rule?

Yes, any of them, and it keeps the original so undoing your edits works. What a challenge is worth and what it is called are part of the catalogue rather than the event.

What it holds

Is my event public?

No. It lives at its own address, it is refused to every search engine, and the only way in is the link you send. There is no directory of events anywhere.

What happens to the photographs?

A photograph is stripped of its metadata before a single byte is stored, so the position of the house it was taken in never reaches us. They are kept for 30 days after the event closes on the free tier and for a year on Party, and before anything is deleted an export of the whole event is emailed to whoever built it.

Can the people who run Fayla read my event?

No. We can see that an event exists, how big it is and what state it is in; there is no route from our end that reads a mission, a score, a photograph, a bill or one word anybody wrote, and none that opens an event as anybody. The privacy notice says exactly what we do see.

Somebody wants their photograph taken down.

Ask whoever is running the event first — they can do it, and the app is built so that taking somebody out does not break what everybody else can see. If that gets nowhere, write to us and it is taken seriously the first time.