How the simulator works

On a test environment, the app doesn't run on the real NFL calendar. It runs a season simulator: a replayed or hand-built season, on a clock an organizer can move. That's what lets a whole season of picking, scoring, and standings play out in an afternoon instead of five months.

What this means for you

• The app's "now" is not your watch. Every kickoff time, pick deadline, and "starts in…" label follows the simulated clock. A game can kick off, play, and go final while no real time passes at all.
• You use the app exactly as you would for real. Join a league, make your picks, watch the standings. Nothing about picking works differently — only the calendar is compressed.
• Picks still lock at kickoff — the simulated one. If the organizer advances time past a game's kickoff, that pick is locked and revealed to the league, just as a real Sunday would have done.
• Results arrive when the organizer advances time. If your picks seem frozen, the season is simply paused between moves — nothing is wrong.
• Games showing 0–0 are "in progress". The simulator deliberately hides a game's final score until the game is over, so a live sim game always reads 0–0 until it goes final.

How a season gets driven (for the organizer)

The simulator is two independent levers: a clock offset (the app's "now", shifted) and a scenario (the season data a provider would report — a replayed real season or a canned edge case). Nothing in the product changes until a sync job ingests what the provider says, so every move is two steps: move the clock, then run the sync.

• Reset the environment first — loading a scenario doesn't clear previously ingested seasons, and a mix of two seasons is confusing to read.
• Load a scenario, then run the schedule (and odds) sync from Admin → Jobs.
• Jump the clock to a week — "before first kickoff" is the anchor for making picks, "after last game" for settling a finished week.
• Advance past kickoffs, then sync scores — games go final and picks grade as the scores land. "Jump to a kickoff slot" lands on one of the week's own kickoff waves, which saves nudging by the hour to reach the late games.

The full operator reference — anchors, fixtures, the scenario library — lives in the repo's docs/simulator-guide.md.

Where it exists

The simulator only exists on test environments. Production never registers it — real leagues always run on the real clock and real NFL data. The simulator controls themselves are visible only to an admin, under Simulator in the top navigation.

Everyone on a test environment sees a Simulated time banner in the header whenever the clock is shifted — every kickoff, deadline, and lock on screen is computed against that instant, not against your device's clock, so it is the time to trust while testing.