About
We build games for rooms full of people.
Chalkbored Games makes digital and interactive games for the places people go out to: bars, clubs, breweries, restaurants, event spaces, and the DJs and hosts who make a Tuesday worth showing up for.
The name is the idea
Chalkboard games are the oldest trick in hospitality. Put something on the board and people stay another hour. The games still work. The labour around them is the problem: writing questions on a Sunday, printing sheets, adding up scores while a room waits, refereeing an argument about an answer that turned out to be wrong.
So we build digital versions of the games rooms already love and move the tedious parts into software. Someone approves the content before the doors open. The server keeps score and can show its work. Your host does the part that needs a person, which is reading the room.
The businesses we build for
We sell to the business running the night. A DJ company with a dozen bar contracts. A brewery taproom that needs Wednesdays to earn their keep. A club that wants something between sets. An events company whose reputation rides on tonight going well.
That decision shapes the rest. Multi-venue sits in the foundations instead of arriving as an upgrade. Branding works per venue, because your client’s bar should look like your client’s bar. We assume the Wi-Fi will fail at least once, because it will.
Our method
Specify first, then implement
Each product starts as a written specification covering the requirements, the security model, the failure cases, and the tests that prove them. Writing it costs us time up front and saves more later, and it means we can tell you what a product does and does not do today.
Our one hard rule
No confident guesses on your screen
We lean on AI to create content and treat what it produces as a draft that has to earn its way onto a screen. A second model from another vendor checks it, cited sources back it, and someone on your team approves it. We ship no mode that skips that step.
Our status today
Early, and saying so
Trivio, our trivia platform, is the furthest along and is opening to a small group of venues. The rest of the catalogue is in development and labelled that way. A page here that says coming soon means coming soon, rather than "available in the enterprise tier".
Our commitments
Four commitments that settle our internal arguments.
01
The night must happen
We judge each feature against a room full of people waiting. If a dependency fails, we have a defined answer ready, down to printing the night on paper and typing the scores in later.
02
Be checkable
Scores recompute from the log. Answers carry sources. Approvals record who saw what. On the things that matter, you do not have to take our word for it.
03
Your brand, not ours
Guests should see the venue they came to. Our name belongs in the licence agreement and not on your big screen.
04
Collect as little as possible
A guest gives us a display name. We send no player data to an AI provider. You set the clock on how long we keep any of it.
We would rather hear about your room than talk about ourselves.
Tell us the nights you run, the ones you have tried, and how they went wrong. That is the most useful conversation we can have right now.