The Analytics tab

Once a game is out in the world, the Studio’s Analytics tab answers the question every designer actually has: is anyone playing this? It covers plays, hours, players, completion and page views, over the last 7, 30 or 90 days.

Pick the range with the control at the top right. Everything on the page moves with it, except the two figures explicitly labelled all-time.

Your own plays never count

Testing your own game is the most common way it gets played, especially early. If those counted, a game you had solo-tested forty times would look like a hit, and the numbers you came here to read would be mostly you.

So they are excluded from every figure on the page and reported on their own, as Your own testing. You are also not counted among your own players.

One exception, and it is deliberate: a table where you played with other people is a real play and counts normally. Only a game you played entirely by yourself is set aside as testing.

What each number means

Plays — how many times the game was played, split between plays at a multiplayer table and solo plays. A play is a table that actually started, or a solo game that lasted more than a moment; opening a lobby nobody ever started is not a play.

Hours played — total time spent playing. This is an estimate, and the tab says so.

Two rules keep it honest. A session where nobody ever moved a piece counts as no time at all, however long the page was open — otherwise a tab left open overnight would report a night of play, which is exactly what used to happen. And each stretch of real play is capped, so a game abandoned and picked up days later cannot bank the days in between.

Solo time is reported by your player’s browser rather than measured on our side, so it is the softer half of the number.

Players — how many different people have played, and how many came back for a second game. This counts signed-in accounts only. Guests at a table and anonymous solo players still show up in Plays, but there is no account to attach them to, so they can never be counted as people. A game played mostly by guests will show more plays than players, and that is correct.

Page views — how many times your game’s public page was loaded. This is page loads, not visitors: taybl sets no tracking cookies at all, so there is no way to tell one person visiting twice from two people visiting once. Search-engine crawlers and your own visits are filtered out. Treat it as a measure of attention, not of audience size.

View → play — plays divided by views over the same period. Two counts side by side rather than a tracked journey: someone may look today and play next week, and nothing links the two visits.

Completion — the share of table plays that reached a finish. Only multiplayer plays count here, because solo play has no finish to reach.

If your game has no end condition, this will always read 0%, and that is not a problem with your game. taybl models a table, not a rules engine — plenty of games here simply never declare themselves over. Ignore this number unless finishing is something your game actually does.

Median session — the middle session length. The median rather than the average, so one abandoned marathon does not drag it. Underneath it is the share of people who left within two minutes — the clearest early signal that a game is confusing to arrive at.

Players per table — average seats filled when play ended. Someone who left early is not counted, so this leans low for a game people drift out of.

Plays per day

The chart shows plays for each day in the range, including days with none. It is there for shape, not precision — a share that lands, a quiet stretch, a slow climb.

Where the numbers come from

Everything here is counted on taybl’s own servers as games are played, not in the browser, so ad-blockers do not affect it. Numbers appear as plays finish; a game still in progress is not counted until it ends.

Play history outlives everything around it. Deleting a session, or letting an old one be cleared away, does not remove the plays it recorded. If someone deletes their taybl account they stop being counted among your players — their plays remain in your totals, but the person does not.

Being found

The public games list can be sorted by Hot this week — recent plays — and Top all time. Recent activity is what Hot ranks on, so a game that gets played a little this week can sit above one that was played heavily a year ago. Play counts are never shown publicly on your game’s page; they only affect that ordering.

Related

• Publishing and sharing — getting your game in front of people
• Playing a game — what a play actually is
• Refining and regenerating