The Four Kinds of Game
Every game in Vallio is one of four kinds. This is the most important idea in the app — it determines what your game is worth, what features it has, and where it shows up afterward.
The ladder
The four kinds form a ladder of increasing structure:
Quick → Venue → Event → League
Quick game — you and some people, anywhere. No venue attached. The loosest kind, and the default when you just start scoring.
Venue game — played on a court at a registered Vallio venue. Because there's a venue, the game can use court features: the queue, game type voting, and check-ins.
Event game — part of an organized competition with a bracket, a format, and registration. Someone set it up in advance and people signed up.
League game — part of a competition that plays out over a season, with standings that build across matches.
Events and leagues work the same way
Both are organized competitions, and they behave almost identically: created the same way, joined the same way, and using the same formats and bracket views.
The difference is time. An event runs and finishes. A league plays out over a season, so its results accumulate into standings rather than resolving in a single sitting.
Practically, it means anything you learn about events applies to leagues. See Events & Leagues.
What changes as you move up
Your rating moves more. The kind of game is Vallio's Source Multiplier — organized play is worth more than casual play. A league game earns more PaddleRank than the identical quick game. See Source Multipliers.
More features become available. A quick game has teams, rules, and a score. A venue game adds the court queue and voting. An event game adds a bracket, registration, and event-wide rules that apply to every match.
Rules move from you to the organizer. In a quick game you pick the target score and scoring style yourself. In an event, the organizer sets rules once and every match in the event uses them.
What doesn't change
The scoring experience is the same everywhere. Singles or doubles, side-out or rally, first to the target — identical whether it's a park game or a league final. Everything in Playing a Game applies to all four kinds.
PaddleRank eligibility is also the same across all four: both teams need at least one registered player. A game full of guests doesn't count anywhere on the ladder.
How Vallio decides which kind a game is
You don't pick the kind directly — it follows from context:
- ›Playing in an event or league match → event or league
- ›Playing on a court at a venue → venue
- ›Neither → quick
Start a game from a venue court and it's a venue game. Start one from your Home tab with no venue and it's a quick game.
Why this matters when reading the rest of the docs
These docs are organized around the same distinction. Anything true of every game lives in Playing a Game. Anything specific to a context lives with that context — court features under Courts, organized play under Compete.
If you're looking for something and can't find it, ask which kind of game it belongs to.