Dev News

Introducing Playgroup.gg Rewind 2024: Celebrate Your Year in Commander!

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 05:00:00 -0600
Maran
**Introducing Playgroup.gg Rewind 2024: Celebrate Your Year in Commander\!** As the year comes to a close, it’s time to look back and celebrate all the incredible Commander games you’ve played in 2024\. We’re excited to unveil **Playgroup.gg Rewind** 2024 – a unique way to reflect on your achievements, track your stats, and share your Commander journey with your friends\! If you login you should see a message t...

Playgroup.gg at Magiccon Amsterdam

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 05:00:00 -0500
Joopster
When we at Playgroup.gg heard that MagicCon 2024 would be held in Amsterdam, it felt like the stars had aligned. With Amsterdam being our hometown and two of our team members calling it home, we knew we couldn't miss this opportunity. To cut it short, exhibiting playgroup.gg at MagicCon was an unforgettable experience. For three days, we were immersed in a whirlwind of excitement and countless games. Meeting ou...

Playgroup 3.2.1 released

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 05:00:00 -0500
Maran
A new day, a new Playgroup.gg app release! This will be the last app release while we focus on our MagicCon attendance, we hope to see you there! **Features** * Added an option to select a Commander as guest user: A new question has been added to the login options menu. When you select you don't have an existing account, and you want to join as Guest you get a new question: Select Commander, or skip selec...

Playgroup 3.2 and MagicCon: Amsterdam

Fri, 24 May 2024 05:00:00 -0500
Maran
Hi everyone, Today we are releasing Playgroup 3.2 which we dubbed: "The mobile release". As we spoken about before, we've always developed Playgroup with a tablet in mind. We need to display quite a lot of data and that doesn't always fit on smaller phone screens. Phone support has always been a bit of an afterthought for that reason. Sadly after collecting some data it appears phones are our biggest demogra...

Playgroup 3.1 & Supporter packs released

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 05:00:00 -0500
Maran
Hey folks, Today we are releasing Playgroup 3.1 which has been a long time coming and comes with a bunch of new cool features. First up though we wanted to introduce our Playgroup supporter packs. In order to keep the development of playgroup.gg going and make it the best Commander analytics platform in existence, we cannot keep ignoring the cost side of things. That’s why we decided to give users the abili...

Help us improve playgroup!

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 06:00:00 -0500
Joopster
It would help us a ton if as many people as possible could fill out this [questionnaire](https://forms.gle/dHEgwtfyyHPaq8KR8). Playgroup.gg has partnered up with a team of information visualization researchers from a University to develop a dashboard for our users to visualize data collected with the app even better. We have come up with a series of charts and the next step is understanding if you, the Comma...

Updates January

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 05:00:00 -0600
Maran
Hi folks, After the release of Playgroup Beta 3 early this month we've been focussing on upgrades to the website, in this post we wanted to take you on a guided tour on some of the new stuff we've added. **Introducing Jomar** ![Jomar pushing updates to Discord](https://i.imgur.com/kY4ZZFz.png) The first thing we added is a Discord Bot; aptly named Jomar the Lorekeeper. You can invite Jomar to a Discord c...

Research survey

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 05:00:00 -0600
Maran
Playgroup is working together with information visualization researchers from INESC-ID and the University of Lisbon, Portugal to create the ultimate data visualization tool for EDH players and they need your help! If you have the time please fill out [this survey](https://forms.gle/7nar1yR9KwbUfowR8). You can find their entire announcement post below: > Hello, all! We are a team of information visualization ...

Playgroup 3.0 now available

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 05:00:00 -0600
Maran Hidskes
A new year, a new Playgroup release! **New Features** Resume/save games: It is now possible to resume a game from where you left it. It doesn’t matter if the app crashed, battery died or you just quit the game halfway, the game will be saved and ready to resume. Game rating: When a game ends you can now choose to give a subjective rating about your experience of that particular game. Currently ratings are n...

Playgroup 2.2.0 has been released

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 05:00:00 -0500
Maran
After two months of dedication, we're thrilled to announce version **2.2.0**. The major highlights of this release include support for guests and in-playgroup deck borrowing. **Guest Support** Over the past few months, the most sought-after feature was guest support. Playgroup was initially designed to cater to fixed groups, mirroring our own experiences with playing Magic. However, this approach posed chall...

Playgroup 2.1.0 has been released

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 05:00:00 -0500
maran
Heya, Playgroup 2.1.0 is now available on all platforms. These are the hilights: ## Pause It's now possible to pause the game, such an amazing new innovative feature, much wow. Pause will automatically be enabled if the app loses focus (by navigating to an other app or alt-tabbing in Windows), when you navigate to the settings or history log, or you can start it manually with a new button that's been added...

Public profiles, Commander stats & Playgroup 2.0.2

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 05:00:00 -0500
Maran
We've got a couple of updates for you today: ## Global Commander stats We've just released a new feature to the website: [Commander leaderboard](https://playgroup.gg/commanders) and [Commander profile pages](https://playgroup.gg/commanders/1290-jodah-archmage-eternal). Ever wanted to know who is the highest ranking commander? Which commander is played the most? We now have these answers. This new features...

Playgroup 2.0.0 is now available

Tue, 23 May 2023 15:00:00 -0500
Joopster
Hi, It's been quite some time but after several months of intensive development, incorporating 15,000 lines of code, removing 2,000 lines, and modifying over 300 files, we are pleased to announce that Playgroup 2.0 is now available. We have redesigned the Playgroup app with mobile first in mind now, most screens are now designed portrait with only the life counter part itself designed for portrait. Sadly the...

New website design & features

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 05:00:00 -0500
Joopster
Hi everybody, We’ve just deployed the new design for the Playgroup website in preparation for the upcoming release of Playgroup 2.0. Along with this new design comes three new features that I want to quickly run by you. ## Global Deck elo rating We’ve introduced a new elo rating for each of your decks that’s unscoped to a specific playgroup. This is especially useful for people that play in multiple playgro...

Playgroup: MTG Life Counter 1.3.0 now available

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 06:00:00 -0500
Joopster
An other day, an other release! The Playgroup Life Counter and Stats tracking app version 1.3.0 is now available. #### New Features - Easy login: Players can now quickly login to the app as a member of their selected playgroup by selecting it from a list. This feature bypasses the need to scan a link code or QR code, and is particularly useful for playgroups where trust is already established. If you do not w...

Development roadmap update

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 06:00:00 -0500
Joopster
Hello everyone, In this blog post, I would like to discuss the different types of Magic: the Gathering players we have identified, the features that they require, and the order in which we have decided to implement these features. Our team at Playgroup began building our life counter app and website based on our own playgroup's requirements. We believe in "eating our own dogfood," which means that we use our...

Playgroup: MTG Life Counter 1.2.0 now available

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 05:00:00 -0600
Joopster
Hi, Playgroup 1.2.0 is now available on Android, iOS, Windows, Linux and HTML5. ***What's new*** **Undo engine** It's now possible to undo actions, if you make a mistake you can undo the last action quickly via the "undo last action" button or browse to the history list and select an older action to undo. This should help clean up the stats as in previous version you had to do a heal action if you wante...

Playgroup: MTG Life Counter 1.1.0 released

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 05:00:00 -0600
Joopster
Hi folks, Playgroup 1.1.0 is now available on all supported platforms, you can grab the latest version over at https://playgroup.gg/download 🎆 ***What's new:*** **Total overhaul of all drag and drop actions.** Our initial plan for attack declaration was very unintuitive looking back. It required an explanation video to show all the features which was probably a sign things could be better. This release...