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Furbol — How It Works

The game I'm hosting didn't fill up

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The game I’m hosting didn’t fill up

You put a game up. People looked, some booked, but by the time kick-off is an hour away the roster still hasn’t hit the minimum you set. What happens to you, as the host?

The short version: Furbol cancels the game for you, pushes everyone who was in it, and you walk away with nothing lost. No payment obligations, no reputation hit, no cooldown on creating another one. If you want to try again tomorrow with a looser setup, you can.

When it happens

The decision point is the last hour — sixty minutes before kick-off. At that moment Furbol does two sweeps:

  1. Anyone who hadn’t confirmed their attendance is removed from the roster.
  2. If what’s left is below the minimum you set when you created the game, Furbol cancels the game.

So “didn’t fill up” really means “didn’t have enough confirmed players at the top of the last hour.” Booked-but-unconfirmed players don’t count toward your quorum at that moment — Furbol treats them as not showing up.

What you see

You get the same cancellation push that every player on the roster gets:

“The game was cancelled.”

The wording is deliberate — it says the game was cancelled, not you cancelled the game. The game’s activity log also shows Furbol as the one that made the call, so the people who had booked know it wasn’t your decision.

On your home screen the game moves out of the active lists and into your history, flagged as cancelled. The “cancel game” option disappears from the dots menu — there’s nothing left for you to do.

What it costs you

Nothing real:

  • No host earnings. There was no game, so there’s nothing to pay out. (See Host Earnings for how earnings work when games do happen.)
  • No rating damage. Hosting a game that auto-cancels doesn’t hit any public stat. Your host record only reflects games that actually got played.
  • No cooldown. You can create another game right now, at the same pitch or a different one, with different settings.
  • No fees charged to players on your behalf. Online holds that had been placed against the game release automatically — nobody pays for a cancelled game.

How to avoid it next time

A few levers:

  • Lower your minimum. If you set quorum at 10 but you could run the game with 8, you’d have avoided this cancel. Edit the game earlier next time.
  • Turn on game on, no matter what. That tells Furbol “run this regardless of headcount” — the last-hour auto-cancel won’t trigger. You take on the risk of a thin game instead, but the game will happen.
  • Nudge people to confirm. Bookings at the top of the last hour don’t count as confirmed unless players have tapped confirm (or booked inside the last hour itself). A push from the host menu or a DM in the group chat can turn a booked-but-unconfirmed roster into a confirmed one.
  • Invite wider. Sharing the game via a link or the invite flow grows the pool of people who might book — helpful if your regular group is thin on a given day.

What you should double-check

If Furbol cancelled your game, it’s worth looking at:

  • Whether your minimum was realistic for that pitch, time slot, and fee. If you keep hitting auto-cancel, the number or the time might be wrong for your crowd.
  • Whether the timing was too ambitious — the time when people confirm tends to be the evening before and the morning of. A game posted late on the day-of may not get enough confirmations before the last-hour cut.
  • Whether “game on, no matter what” fits your style. Some hosts prefer to always run; others prefer the auto-cancel safety net. Both are valid.

What about “game on, no matter what”?

If you’d flipped the game on, no matter what switch, the last-hour cut wouldn’t cancel the game. The unconfirmed players still get cleared, but the game itself stays alive — you decide at the pitch whether to play with whatever’s left. See Game On, No Matter What.