Crews and Theme Buckets

What a crew is

A crew is a group of people that carries on between seasons. A league is one competition and then it is over. A crew is the group that keeps playing them.

Crews have members, a chat, an invite code, a shared pool of theme ideas, and a list of the leagues they have run. They do not have rounds, scores or a leaderboard of their own.

Crew roles

Crew admins can create leagues for the crew, manage the roster and ban people. Everybody else is a member.

Banning is stronger than removing. A banned person cannot rejoin using the invite code. Leagues have no ban list, only removal.

Crew leagues

A league attached to a crew is always private and only crew members can get in. Only crew admins can create one.

When a crew league is created, everyone in the crew is notified.

Crew wide song history

A crew can insist that a song used in any of its leagues cannot be used again in another one. That is wider than the league level version, which only looks at earlier rounds of the same league.

It is the setting to turn on if your crew has run several seasons and the same songs keep coming back.

The theme bucket

The bucket is a shared pool of round ideas that belongs to the crew rather than to any one league. Any crew member can add to it, at any time, whether or not a league is running.

It works well as a place to drop an idea the moment you have it, rather than trying to think of twelve themes on the day you create a league.

Bucket leagues

A crew league can be set to draw its themes from the bucket instead of having them listed up front. Nobody knows what is coming, including the person who made the league.

A bucket league does not offer Add Round, and instead of round three of eight it says bucket league, round three.

How a theme gets picked

When a round finishes and there is nothing queued behind it, the league takes another theme from the bucket at random.

It never repeats a theme within the same league. It prefers themes no league in the crew has played yet, and only falls back to ones that have been used when there is nothing fresh left, because a repeat is better than a league that stops.

A league can be set to delete each theme as it uses it. That removes it from the bucket for every league in the crew, so use it only if you want ideas to be spent permanently.

Editing or deleting a theme in the bucket only affects future picks. A round that has already taken it keeps what it took. Themes added while a league is running become available immediately.

The round limit

A bucket league would otherwise run until the bucket ran dry, so it has a round limit, between 2 and 50, with 5 as the default.

The admin can change it while the league is running. You can raise it, lower it, or remove it entirely. The lowest you can set it to is the number of rounds already played, which means finish at the end of the round you are on. You cannot set it lower than that, because rounds already played are never taken away.