Tap. You're in the show.
A silicone wristband turns every guest into a named contestant in a season-long competition that spans a client's entire estate. One tap puts their name on the big screen, scores their win, and moves them up a leaderboard every park can see — live. Built for holiday park resorts first; cruise ships follow.
A footfall engine disguised as a wristband#
The points that decide the season are earned by physically being at a live show — phone play counts, but only as a trickle. For an operator with fifteen parks, that makes the leaderboard a nightly reason to walk into the entertainment venue, and a season-long reason to come back.
"Player 3" becomes "Maya · Primrose Valley, #3 across the whole estate." Guests chase a real prize all season, across every stay, and watch their name move in real time.
The big points only exist in the room, so the competition drives attendance — and attendance drives the bar. Guests sign up to play during the night, so the host starts every game with a pool of willing contestants instead of working the crowd.
NFC ships as a separately licensed pack (requires Companion), with bands as a recurring per-guest consumable. The season layer is the reason a fifteen-park client licenses all fifteen — and the gamified crowd throws off estate-wide entertainment analytics no competitor can offer.
From check-in to champion#
Stage contestants never need their phones — the band and the host carry the whole interaction. Phones are the practice ground and the sign-up sheet: learn the games by day, put your hand up for tonight, then win the real points in the room.
Bands are issued at park check-in. Guests who want to compete give a first name, email and date of birth — two minutes, once. Staff verify 18+ with ID and issue the right colour band. Anyone can skip it and still play casually.
The host touches a handheld reader to a contestant's wrist — name on screen, lights, sting. A tap totem at the stage stairs handles self-serve check-in. Readers double as buzzers: first wrist on the pad wins.
Every game is playable on the phone for small practice points — track the orbs in Orbit by the pool, arrive sharper for the stage version. From the app (or a tap at the venue totem) guests sign up to play tonight's games before the show even starts.
Points follow the guest across every stay and every park in the estate. Leaderboards in every venue show site and client-wide standings live; season champions are crowned and contacted at the end.
One scoreboard, two prices#
Everything counts, but not equally: phone play earns a trickle, the stage pays a flood. Guests can practise every game from a sunlounger and watch their total tick up — but a single stage win outweighs weeks of app play, so the leaderboard is still decided in the room.
- Earned only by NFC-verified presence at a live show — the band tap is the proof.
- Every earning moment happens under a host's eyes: stage games like Orbit, karaoke and live bingo.
- Standardised schedule so a bingo win and a buzzer win weigh the same.
- Every game playable on the phone, any time — the same formats guests will face on stage.
- Worth a fraction of stage value and capped per day, so practice nudges a total but can never win a season.
- The payoff is competence: guests who practised step up faster, play sharper, and make better shows.
The points schedule
Defaults — operator-tunable per client, fixed across the estate so every park competes on the same terms:
Live, estate-wide
Every venue shows both boards in real time — your park, and the whole client:
Guests put their hand up for tonight's games from the app or with a band tap at the venue totem. The host opens every game with a ready list of names — picks from the pool, the phone pings "you're up", and the guest taps in at the stage. Age gates filter eligibility automatically at sign-up. Walk-ups still welcome.
The whole night is built in Showhub — games dragged onto a timeline, each with a maximum time. Tonight's pool then sets the actual length: twenty sign-ups for a four-at-a-time game and the system auto-fits the rounds within the cap. And every show it runs makes the next estimate sharper, estate-wide.
The client defines the season window — say March to October. A guest's points accumulate across every stay and every park within it. At season end, each site crowns its champion, the estate crowns one overall, and winners are contacted on the email captured at registration. First name + home park is all the public screens ever show.
The sixty-second version#
The band itself is almost dumb — and that's the design. It carries a single opaque token, like a cloakroom ticket. Names, emails and birthdays never touch the band; they live in the guest profile, with the cloud as the system of record and every box holding a local copy.
A deliberate 1–3cm tap. The band surrenders one thing: an anonymous 128-bit token. No name, no email, no age on the band itself.
The reader — the host's handheld, the stage totem, or USB at the box — sends the token with its reader ID and timestamp over the staff-only network.
The box checks its local profile cache: it's Maya, she's profiled, she's 18+, she's checked into tonight's show — and her season total is 1,215.
Name on screen, lights and sound fired by the box itself — Showhub runs the whole night natively — and the points event posts to the season leaderboard within seconds.
A lost band is a £1 shrug, not a data breach — the token is meaningless without our registry. The show runs entirely on the box even if the park's internet dies mid-game; points queue locally and sync when it returns. And the cloud being the system of record is exactly what makes one leaderboard across fifteen parks possible.
The band is the age credential#
Gambling-adjacent games like cash bingo carry age rules that vary by jurisdiction. We make the wristband itself the answer — checked once at reception, enforced everywhere, visible from across the room.
The colour is the human check — a host can see a junior band from the stage. The registry is the machine check — an age-gated game simply refuses the tap, politely, before anyone is embarrassed.
Every game carries an age-gate flag the operator configures per site to match local rules — cash bingo 18+, family prize bingo open to all. The platform enforces whatever they set; compliance stays where the licence is.
Pre-built, certified, replaceable anywhere#
A deliberate decision: no custom electronics in v1. Every radio in the system is someone else's CE/UKCA/FCC certification and someone else's durability testing — a dead unit is replaced from stock, not re-soldered.
A bespoke prop reader — the wand, or a reader built into the host's mic flag — is deferred, not dead. Until volume justifies the certification cost, a branded shroud over the Famoco gives us the look without the liability.
Collect little, promise less, honour it#
Even with profiles in the picture, the privacy posture stays the sales pitch: casual play needs nothing, competing needs three fields, and every field has exactly one job.
- Tap and play with just a first name typed at a kiosk or phone — kept in box memory for the session only.
- No leaderboard, no prizes, nothing stored. The fun works; the data stays at zero.
- First name, email and date of birth, captured at reception or self-serve from the guest's own phone.
- Email is for prize contact only — locked decision, no marketing use. DOB sets the age tier and is never displayed.
- Public screens show first name + home park, nothing more. Erasure on request is one action, estate-wide.
Under-18 profiles are created by the lead booker at reception — children's data goes through a parent, by design. Full profile details exist in exactly two places: the operator's portal, and nowhere else.
Bleeding edge, boringly reliable#
The technology is only groundbreaking if nobody in the audience ever sees it break. The whole suite is engineered around one doctrine: NFC failing must be invisible.
Behind that: every tap and every points event is idempotent so retries are harmless, every box holds a working copy of the client registry, and the cloud reconciles rather than referees. There is no single point of failure between a guest's wrist and the leaderboard.
Prizes mean the leaderboard must be unbribable#
Season prizes attach real value to the competition from day one, so integrity is designed in rather than bolted on. The strongest control is the model itself: every point that can decide the season is earned in front of a host.
Show Points only exist where a band physically tapped a reader at a staffed live show. The one remote path — practice play — is priced at a trickle and capped daily, so farming it is pointless by construction.
Impossible travel between parks, duplicate concurrent taps, inhuman practice-play cadence — anomalies flag for review, and operators get point-correction tools with a full audit trail.
Band tokens carry a version prefix from day one, so cryptographic NTAG 424 DNA bands (~£1.50–2.50) drop into the same system the moment self-service value — cashless prizes, paid entries — arrives.
Parks first, ships later#
The launch market is the holiday park resort — reliable connectivity, estate-scale clients, and an entertainment programme every night of the season. Everything maritime (long-offline registries, satellite tolerances) is already designed and waits its turn.
Band issue and profile capture at reception, two-colour age bands, tap-to-reveal, stage check-in and buzz with handheld + totem, casual anonymous tier, self-serve profile from the guest's phone.
The two-price scoring engine (Show Points + capped Practice Points), real-time site and client-wide leaderboards in every venue, the contestant sign-up pool with programme runtime estimates, season administration, age-gated game configuration, winner crowning and prize contact.
Booking-system import for frictionless registration, the cruise/offline mode for ships, and the secure-band tier when self-service value arrives.
Indicative venue kit
Hardware to make one park venue fully NFC-capable, at list component pricing before any volume agreement:
Source of truth: spec 14 (v0.5) · spec 15 (v0.2) · spec 16 (v0.2) · 2026-06-12
References only the catalogue as published on this site — updated as new titles publish
Showhub · Mercury Glass