HouseDraft has been up and running for a few years now, and I’ve kept thinking “after <X> I’ll advertise it on Reddit,” but the time never seemed right. So now you fine folks are the first to hear the official announcement, I guess. But yeah, my friends and I have been using this site to run drafts at our houses (hence the name) for years now, and it works fine.
It’s free to use, you don’t need to make an account, it doesn’t show ads or mine your data or anything. There’s no catch. Unless you count the fact that I’m coding it as a hobby in my spare time, so the update schedule is pretty slow.
At present, Swiss is the only supported tournament format. I’d like to at least add support for single-elimination brackets so you can cut to a Top 8, but see above about my update schedule.
In the likely event that you don’t immediately understand how to use the site, refer to the “instructions” and “about” links at the top-right of the page.
Feedback is welcome!
Nice! Got a GitHub repo?
Thanks for the feedback!
I primarily use GitLab, so the repo is at: https://gitlab.com/Triskaideka/housedraft
To restart the clock at 50 minutes (or whatever’s in that field), click “Stop” (instead of “Pause”) and then “Start” again. I don’t think I’ve coded any interaction between the timer and what round it is. Don’t want to micromanage too much.
You’re right that those up and down arrows are small targets. I’ll see what I can do. The “2-1” etc. buttons would be nice, only problem is that I have a feature (see under “+ settings”) that lets you set how many games are in a match. If you set it to something ridiculous like 23, that would be a lot of possible buttons. But I have some thoughts about how to put a lid on that. So that feature is a solid maybe.
Ah, gotcha. I probably didn’t pay attention to the timer and it was just continously ticking.
When I generated the pairings for round 2, the timer from round 1 started counting down (continuing from the time when it stopped). It should have reset to 50 minutes and waited for me to start it manually, no?
It could be nice to have an easier way to enter game wins and ties with the mouse. I appreciate that it’s quick to do with the keyboard using the tab key, but there’s a lot of clicking around when you want to do it with the mouse, and the “tickers” that let you add or subtract 1 are quite small (I know it’s the default browser look, but maybe some custom styling is warranted here).
The official Wizards app they use at LGS’ has buttons you can click to enter results like 2-1 and 2-0, I think, which could be nice if they look nice and feel intuitive.
