Rules
Four settings decide how a game plays. All of them are adjustable, and all of them have sensible defaults.
Play Style
How points are scored.
Side Out — only the serving team can score. Losing a rally rotates serve instead of awarding a point.
Rally — a point is scored on every rally, regardless of who served.
Side out is traditional. Games take longer and swing on serve retention. Rally scoring is faster and more predictable in length, which is why organized play often prefers it — you can schedule around it.
If you're new, rally is the easier one to keep score of.
Win Condition
Win By 1 — first team to reach the target score wins, regardless of margin.
Win By 2 — the winning team must be two points clear, so a game at 10–10 continues until someone leads by two.
Win by 2 is the competitive standard and produces better endings. Win by 1 caps the length, which matters when there's a queue waiting for the court or a bracket to get through.
Target Score
Any value from 1 to 30. The default is 11.
Common choices:
- ›7 — quick warm-up games
- ›11 — standard play, and the default
- ›15 — extended matches
- ›21 — full recreational games
Lower targets favor whoever starts hot. Higher targets favor the better team, because variance evens out. If you want a fair test, play to 15 or 21; if you want to get through eight people on one court, play to 7 or 11.
Timeouts
The number of timeouts allowed per team. Set 0 to disable them entirely; the maximum is 3.
Casual games usually run at 0. See Timeouts.
Coin Toss
Tap Coin Toss to fairly decide which team serves first.
Worth using in side-out games especially, where serving first is a real advantage.
Presets
Two presets fill everything at once:
- ›Singles — singles game type with default rules
- ›Doubles — doubles game type with default rules
You can adjust anything after applying one. For most casual play a preset plus a coin toss is the whole setup.
Rules in an event or league
In organized play, the organizer sets the rules once and they apply to every match in the event. You don't set them per game.
Event creation exposes the same choices — game point (7, 11, 15, or 21), win condition, and scoring style — plus event-level settings like skill range and gender category.
That consistency is much of the point of an event: every match runs under identical conditions, so results are comparable.