TablePulse App

TablePulse covers six distinct areas, each accessible from the bottom tab bar: Pulse, Shelf, Plan, Scan, Sessions, and Places. The Pulse screen acts as a dashboard — it surfaces a recommended game for the evening based on your shelf, displays a fit percentage alongside reasons like player count suitability, available time, and rules weight, and flags games you own but have never played under a "Rescue from shelf" section. It's a genuinely useful home screen rather than a decorative one.

Building and Managing Your Shelf

Adding games works two ways: search a built-in catalog of popular titles that includes cover art, player counts, play time, complexity, and ratings, or scan a physical box with the camera. Each game can carry a status — owned, wishlist, want to play, lent out, and others — so the shelf reflects your actual situation rather than just a flat list. Codenames, for example, appears in the screenshots with its year (2015), player count (2–8), and a weight rating of 1.3, giving a sense of how much detail the catalog carries.

Planning a Night and Logging Sessions

• The Plan screen takes your group size and available minutes as numeric inputs, then layers on experience level (New players, Mixed, or Experienced), mood (Relaxed, Competitive, Cooperative, and others), a specific place from your saved locations, and optional restrictions like "No long rules," "Small table only," or "Portable games only."
• Recommendations come ranked from your own shelf — not from a generic external list.
• Sessions can be logged in full (game, date, duration, players, winner, notes) or via a quick-log that pulls directly from your shelf chips. A logged Pandemic session in the screenshots records 48 minutes, three players, and a cooperative group win with a personal note attached.

One honest limitation worth noting: the filter chips and stepper buttons are visually small, and the Edit/Delete pair sitting side by side in session and place cards carries some accidental-tap risk. These are minor interface friction points in an otherwise clean layout.

The Visuals Feel Like a Game in Themselves

The UI runs on a near-black background with magenta and pink as its primary accent colors and gold used for active tab states. Every screenshot is set against 3D candy-land decorative backgrounds — glowing spheres, rainbow arches, grape clusters, candy cane poles — which give the app a distinctly playful identity. There's something in that layered, tile-and-token aesthetic that echoes the feel of sorting through a box of game pieces: colorful, a little chaotic on the surface, but organized underneath. The app icon itself shows a pink box spilling out a meeple, a pawn, an hourglass, star tokens, and cards — which is exactly what the app is trying to hold together.

Places and Reminders

The Places tab stores named locations — a café, a club, your kitchen table — each tagged with table size (Small, Medium, or Large), noise level, and notes on what types of games work there. Location tagging is optional, and the app notes explicitly that places stay private and local. Reminders can be created with a local notification at a chosen time, with no server involved.

TablePulse is a well-scoped tool: it doesn't try to be a social network or a BGG replacement, and that restraint is its clearest strength. The shelf, the planner, and the session log work together in a way that feels considered rather than padded.