The Games Tab, Live: A Beer Pong Pilot at a Birthday
On May 16, 2026, we ran the first live test of Sledge's Games tab during a birthday gathering in Singapore. About a dozen people across the evening, a beer pong table, and the Games tab quietly handling the queue, live scoring, and match history from a phone in the host's pocket.
We've hosted gatherings on Sledge before. What made this one different: for the first time, the Games tab carried the event itself — queue logic, winner-stays-on, score entry, match history — running live in front of real people at a casual event. Not a structured competition like our first padel tournament last month, but a party with a side of structure.
The Setting
Saturday evening. A rooftop in town. A beer pong table set up early in the night, with people drifting between the table and the rest of the gathering. No fixed schedule, no kickoff time, no "round one starts at" — just a queue that grew and shrank as the evening moved.
Saturday, May 16 — the gathering as it kicked off
What We Ran on Sledge
The host opened a single Sledge listing on their phone. Through the evening, that one listing handled:
- Live queue — who's next at the table, surfaced on a phone anyone could glance at
- Score tracking — each game's result entered directly into the app as it ended
- Match history — a running record of who played whom, and the outcome
- Winner stays on — the queue logic automatically held the winning side at the table for the next match
- Visibility into who plays next — anyone could check their phone instead of asking the host
Mid-evening — winner stays on, queue ticking forward
The Observation That Mattered
We weren't stress-testing infrastructure. We were watching what happens when software shows up during an experience instead of only before it.
The thing that stood out: nobody asked how it worked.
People picked it up and used it without onboarding, without instructions, without the host having to explain anything. Someone's game ended, they checked who was up next, they handed the cups over. The app sat quietly in the background and did its job.
That's the part of an experience most platforms don't touch. The booking layer is well-covered — you can find an event, pay, get a calendar invite, show up. But what happens between "everyone arrived" and "everyone went home" usually falls back to a whiteboard, a WhatsApp group, or someone's memory. We're testing whether software can do better there.
How Participants Joined
The Sledge link went out in the gathering's group chat. People opened it, saw the event details, and joined directly through the app — most without creating an account upfront, using the same guest checkout flow we ran for the padel tournament. Their booking history is linked, and after the event they got an email inviting them to claim a full account.
A Full Evening of Games
The queue ran from the early evening until late. Multiple rounds, winners staying on, new pairs cycling in as people arrived or rotated out. Chaos became structure, without anyone having to actively manage it.
At the end of the night, the match history was there — every game, every score, every win — sitting on the listing for anyone who wanted to look back. The photos from the night sit on the same listing too, in the Memories tab.
A dozen people across the evening — queue, scores, history all on one phone
What We Learned
Padel taught us that Sledge can run a structured competitive event end-to-end. Beer pong was the first time the Games tab — queue, live scoring, match history, winner-stays-on — ran in front of real people at a casual event, with no fixed start time and no podium.
The shape of the event changed. The Games tab underneath didn't need to.
What's Next
Sledge covers the before, during, and after of any in-person experience. The booking is the before. The accumulation — memories, history, who you played with, what you achieved — is the after. What we're proving now, one event at a time, is that the during is a real surface too: software showing up while the experience is actually happening.
We're testing this across more shapes: football matches, classes, tournaments, workshops, gatherings, community events. Different experiences need different tools, but the underlying frame holds.
Want to see the event itself? View the live event page, photos, and match history here.
A birthday. A beer pong table. A dozen people. One link.
The Games tab, live.