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Furbol — How It Works

Sharing a Game

Sharing a Game

This page walks through what sharing a game outside Furbol looks like from your side of the screen — tap, share sheet, done — plus what the recipient sees when they open the link. The rules behind it live on Sharing a Game (rules).

1. Find the Share button

Open the game. In the top-right of the game detail page, tap the three-dot overflow menu.

Among the entries (share, report, and, if you’re the host, edit / cancel) there’s a SHARE row. Tap it.

2. What happens when you tap

Nothing fancy on your side. The app:

  1. Asks Furbol’s server to create (or re-use) your share link for this game.
  2. Opens your phone’s native share sheet with the link pre-filled.

No modal in between, no in-app preview of what the recipient will see, no “pick a contact” screen inside Furbol. It’s just the OS sheet — WhatsApp, Messages, email, copy-link, all your usual options.

Worth knowing: the share sheet is pre-filled with just the URL. There’s no stock invite text like “Hey, come play this game at …” prepended. Whatever you want to say to the recipient, you type yourself in the messenger after the link gets pasted.

The link Furbol generates is yours — tied to you as the inviter. Re-sharing the same game doesn’t mint new links; Furbol reuses the same one for a given game-and-sharer pair.

So the link you copy from this game today is the same one you copied last week. Good for pinning in a group chat; you don’t have to refresh it when you re-share.

4. What the recipient sees

Three cases, depending on where they are when they tap:

They have Furbol and they’re signed in

The app opens the game page directly. Before that, Furbol records you as the one who invited them (same mechanism as a direct game invitation). For private and secret games, this invitation is what grants them access — they couldn’t have seen the game without the link.

After the game opens, the app offers to follow you — unless they already do. They can dismiss this without affecting the invitation.

They have Furbol but aren’t signed in

Furbol remembers the link. Once they finish signing in, the invitation is applied and the game opens.

They don’t have Furbol

The link opens a full game page in their browser, written in their language (Furbol picks it from their phone’s language, falling back to yours). It shows:

  • Who invited them — your nickname, right at the top: ”… invited you to play”.
  • The venue name and city, the day and kick-off time, and the format (5-a-side, 7-a-side…).
  • The player count — how many are in, out of the maximum — and, highlighted, how many spots are left.
  • The price per player and how it’s paid — at the pitch or in the app — or “Free”.
  • A Directions link that opens the pitch on the map, and the game picture with the current lineup.
  • A big Get the app & join button plus App Store and Google Play badges, and a short “What’s Furbol?” explainer at the bottom.

If the game is full, cancelled, already being played, or already over, the page says exactly that instead of inviting them in.

The same page is what messengers use to unfurl the link when it gets pasted into a chat — the rich card that appears below the URL shows the venue and kick-off time, who’s inviting, how many spots are left, and the lineup picture.

And the invite survives the install. When they tap an install button and open Furbol for the first time after the store round-trip, Furbol picks the invite back up on its own: once they finish signing up, the game opens and your invitation is applied — no need to go back to the chat and tap the link again. (Tapping it again works too, and flows into the “signed in” case above.)

5. What the recipient’s invitation unlocks

Same game, different effect depending on the game’s kind:

  • Public game — the link is a convenience. They could have found the game on their own.
  • Private game — the link’s invitation grants access. Without one (direct or via share), they can’t see or join.
  • Secret game — same. They wouldn’t even see the game existed until the link was opened.

So sharing a private or secret game really does expand the invite list by one each time someone new redeems the link.

6. What you won’t see in this flow today

Worth naming:

  • No in-app preview of what the recipient gets. If you want to see the browser preview for yourself, you’d have to open the link in a logged-out browser or a messenger that shows the unfurl.
  • No stock invite text in the share sheet. It’s a design choice — Furbol lets you write the nudge yourself — but if you were expecting “click to share with default copy,” you’ll get just a URL and have to add context yourself.
  • No way to un-share a link after the fact. Once you’ve sent it, anyone with the URL can redeem it, and the invitation it creates is a real invitation. If someone you didn’t mean to reach gets hold of the link and opens it, the fix is on the game side — excluding them via the invites tab (see Inviting Someone to a Game).
  • No delivery confirmation. Furbol doesn’t tell you “your link was opened by three people” — the invites tab’s “Others invited” section surfaces it eventually, once someone actually redeems the link.

7. Sharing your profile, not a game

The same machinery works for people. From the side menu, tapping the QR opens your magic link screen — a dark, story-style share card with your portrait, a round-dot QR code with the Furbol ball at its centre, and the Furbol logo. Share sends the card as a picture together with your link; Download saves the card as an image you can print or post. Player, host, and venue pages also have a share icon at the top that sends that profile’s link, plain, through your phone’s share sheet.

What the receiver of a profile link sees mirrors the game story. With Furbol installed, the profile opens and they get the “Do you know this dude?” follow offer. Without it, the link opens a web copy of the profile in their browser — portrait, nickname, level, games played, followers, the last-10-games highlights, and the ratings teammates have given — with a Get the app & connect button and store badges. Install, sign up, and Furbol remembers whose profile brought them: the follow offer appears without tapping the link again.

The full story of profile links lives on Magic Links.