Most friend groups have a game they've run for years — a draft, a pool, a Calcutta — held together by a spreadsheet and a group chat. The Patio is an experiment in turning those into real little apps.
The idea is simple: the same scoring system that took a person a season to maintain in Excel can now be wired up in an afternoon. So the weird, specific rules your group argues about don't have to be flattened into someone else's template — they can just become the game.
It started with the games we already played ourselves — a golf-major draft we'd run for years, and a March Madness team draft that began on a high-school lunchtime patio (yes, that's where the name comes from). Then a World Cup auction, where fifty-one people bid on nations and a secondary market got built the same night.
Now it runs drafts, Calcutta auctions, survivor pools and weekly pick'em across football, college football, golf, club soccer, tennis and the World Cup — with the scoring, the deadlines, the standings and the who-owes-whom handled. The game itself still lives where it always did: in your group chat.
The bar for building something here isn't how many people would use it. It's whether it makes the game more fun for the eight or ten people playing. That's why there's a daily newspaper, a scenario lab, and absurd generated artwork of the teams you just bought at auction.
Host a game for your group, propose a format nobody has built, or just ask a question. All of it lands with a person who reads it.