Creating events
An event in Sideboard is the definition of something you run — “Friday Night Magic, 7pm, 20 seats, $10.” If it repeats, you create it once and Sideboard generates every future night from the rule. You never pre-build a year of Fridays.
Creating an event
- Open Calendar in the sidebar.
- Click New event (or select a day first and click New event on this day — the date is prefilled).
- Fill in the form and click Create event.
The form, field by field
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Title | What customers see. “FNM”, “Release Day”, “Commander Night”. |
| Description | Optional detail — format, prize support, house rules. |
| Recurrence | One-time, Weekly, or Monthly. See below. |
| Start date | The first night. Can’t be in the past on a new event. |
| End date | Recurring events only. Leave blank to run indefinitely. |
| Start time | In your calendar’s time zone, which the store owner sets in Settings → Organization → Calendar. Defaults to 7:00 pm. |
| Duration (minutes) | How long it runs. Defaults to 120. |
| Capacity | Seats per night. Leave blank for unlimited. |
| Ticket price | Leave blank or 0 for a free event. How you collect it is a separate, store-wide setting — see Tickets and payment. |
| External ticket link | For nights you sell somewhere else — Eventbrite, Melee.gg, a league’s own page. Attendees still sign up here so you keep the roster, and they get a Buy your ticket button pointing at your link. While it’s set, that event is never sold through your Shopify checkout. See Tickets and payment. |
| Collect player tag | Asks each attendee for their in-game handle at sign-up. |
Recurrence options
One-time — a single night. No end date.
Weekly — pick the day of week and how often it repeats. “Every 1 weeks” on Friday is a standard FNM; “every 2 weeks” gives you a fortnightly league.
Monthly — two ways to express it:
- By day of month — “the 15th, every month.”
- By nth weekday — “the first Saturday”, “the last Sunday”. This is the one you want for most monthly tournaments, because it tracks the calendar the way players think about it.
Both take an interval, so “every 3 months on the first Saturday” is a quarterly event.
Editing an event
Open Calendar, click the event on any of its dates, and you land on the event page. The Event details form at the top is the same form you filled in at creation, plus a Status control.
Changes apply to the whole series. If you move FNM from 7pm to 6:30pm, every future Friday moves — and if your storefront lists the events, those listings update within moments.
| Status | Effect |
|---|---|
| Active | Normal. Visible on the public calendar, accepting sign-ups. |
| Cancelled | Hidden from the public calendar, sign-ups stop. |
| Archived | Same as cancelled, for events you’re done with but don’t want to delete. |
Featured image
On the event page, the Featured image panel adds a banner for the event. PNG, JPEG, or WebP, up to 4 MB — large images are shrunk automatically, and the panel tells you if one still doesn’t fit.
It shows on your public calendar and — when Shopify is connected — on the storefront event listing and the ticket product. Use Replace image to swap it or Remove to clear it; either way the change pushes to Shopify on its own.
The panel only appears when you’re editing an existing event, not while creating one (the event needs to exist before it can hold an image).
Upcoming occurrences
Below the form, Upcoming occurrences lists the next 90 days of dates generated by the event’s rule, with the registered count against capacity for each.
Each row gives you:
- Attendees — open that night’s roster. See Sign-ups and attendees.
- Cancel — call off that one night. It stays on the calendar, struck through, so customers can see it was cancelled rather than wondering where it went.
- Delete — remove that one night entirely (recurring events only). It vanishes from every calendar and won’t come back when the rule regenerates.
Cancelling vs. deleting
Three different actions, three different outcomes:
| Action | What happens | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Cancel a night | Night stays visible, struck through. Sign-ups stop. | Snow day. You want registrants to see it’s off. |
| Delete a night | Night disappears from all calendars, permanently. | You’re skipping a holiday week and don’t want it advertised at all. |
| Delete event / Delete series | The whole event and every one of its nights, gone. Attendee records go with it, and any Shopify ticket products are archived. | The event is over for good. |
Deleting is permanent — Sideboard asks you to confirm, and if anyone has already signed up it tells you how many people are registered and makes you confirm a second time before it removes their registrations.
Setting the event’s status to Archived is the softer option: it stops sign-ups and hides the event without destroying the history.
What’s next
- Sign-ups and attendees — the roster, payment status, and CSV export
- Tickets and payment — charging for a seat
- Events on your storefront — getting these events onto your Shopify site
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