It's Tournament Time: Announcing the BracketBoss Beta Release

It all started with a Raspberry Pi and a classic Nintendo 64 game.

I recently turned a Pi 4 into a retro gaming emulator, and with my marketing team heading into our busy season, I thought it would be the perfect tool for some fun, low-stress team building. The idea was simple: a company-wide Mario Kart N64 tournament. We could run a couple of hours of matches each day for a week, with each race only taking about 15 minutes. It felt like a great way to step back, have some fun, and indulge in a little friendly competition.

There was just one problem: I needed a good way to manage the bracket.

The Search for the Right Tool

I started looking for a solution, and I was honestly surprised by what I found—or rather, what I didn't find. Most options seemed designed for large-scale, in-person sporting events and were often expensive. I needed something versatile enough for video games, board games, or any other kind of friendly competition.

More importantly, I wanted to eliminate any barriers for my team. I envisioned a dashboard where I could post tournaments ahead of time and people could simply enroll if they were interested. The last thing anyone needs is yet another username and password to remember. I couldn’t find a single tool that worked that way.

"Fine, I'll Do It Myself."

After coming up empty, the self-hoster in me took over. I decided to build my own solution. What started as a small side project to manage a Mario Kart tournament quickly grew into something I realized could be much more.

And so, BracketBoss was born.

It’s a clean, simple, and self-hostable application for creating and managing tournaments, built on a modern tech stack with React, Node.js, and all running in Docker containers behind an Nginx proxy.

My core philosophy was zero friction for participants. Only admins need an account to create and manage events. Everyone else can view brackets and enroll in upcoming tournaments from a public dashboard. The system automatically generates a balanced, single-elimination bracket with random seeding and correct handling for byes. It even has an automated scheduler that can generate a full match timeline while respecting blackout periods you define.

Open Source, By Design

I’ve always wanted to contribute something back to the open-source community, and this felt like the perfect opportunity. I’ve released BracketBoss under the Apache 2.0 license with a Commons Clause. This means you are free to use, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose. The only restriction is that you can't sell the software as a commercial product.

It's a Beta! (And I Need Your Help)

While developing and showing the project to friends and family, someone mentioned that the sports team they coach pays hundreds of dollars for bracket software, often just for a single tournament. The thought that this tool could eventually eliminate those costs for non-profits like schools is a huge motivation for me.

That's the long-term vision. For now, please keep in mind that this is a beta release and the program is in its infancy. You might find bugs, and there are many features I still want to add (like support for round-robin formats and real-time match updates). But it's in a place that feels too good not to share.

I'm looking for beta testers who are willing to give it a try and provide feedback. Your insights will be invaluable in shaping the future of the project. I'm also planning to get a public demo site up and running soon, but one step at a time—something that's easy to forget when you're excited about a project!

The Future

I've always been fascinated by the hosting side of things (hence my passion for self-hosting!), and if I can get enough features built out, I think exploring a simple, affordable hosted version of BracketBoss could be a fantastic next step. This would provide a sustainable way to fund development while keeping the code free forever for those who want to run it themselves.

For now, though, I'm just excited to finally share what I've been working on.

You can check out the beta release on GitHub, view the code, and read the documentation to get started. Let me know what you think!