You are the umpire, not the athlete. The game knows where every ball landed, to the millimetre. It will never tell you.
Six sports · You never hit the ball · No account
Release date 1 November 2026
Ninety seconds recorded out of the running game. Every rally, every call and every time the crowd gets out of its seat is something the game did on its own.
Ninety seconds · recorded on v0.3.2 · 720p here · 1080p60 original
Shuttle cam · live in this page
This is the moment the whole game is built around. The overhead camera shows you what it shows the umpire, which is not quite enough. Call it, and only then see where it really landed and what the hall thought of you.
In the game it is left click for in, right click for out, plus L for a let, W for the service court and F for a fault or card.
The shuttle is down. Nobody in this building is certain except the simulation, and it is not talking.
Twelve thousand people are watching one person, and it is not either of the players.
One official · one reputation
Each sport asks you to judge something none of the others do, and each one climbs from a community hall to a building modelled on a real Malaysian venue. Pick one, then flip between the bottom of its ladder and the top.
Two line judges, diagonal corners
Top of the ladder: an arena drawn from the Axiata Arena: two tiers of blue seats, glass suites and a screen cube over the floor.
A shuttlecock with its own drag model, and two officials who are wrong about as often as a coin on the close ones. Agree with a mistake and the blame is shared in plain sight.
What you are actually deciding
In · out · let · four faults
IN, OUT, LET, and the four faults: net touch, carry, double hit, obstruction. Every fault has both a recorded truth and something visible on court: the net shakes, the ball sticks on the racket for a moment, a player genuinely reaches over.
Which means ignoring one is itself a lie.
Wrong about as often as a coin
They sit at diagonally opposite corners, so the pair see all four boundary lines between them. Agree with a mistake and the blame is shared with an official in plain sight. Overrule them and the hall has watched two officials disagree, with only your call left standing.
National level and above
Two reviews a side per game, a successful one handed back. Players sometimes challenge a call you got right. Otherwise a challenge would be a verdict announced in advance.
It is the one moment in the game where the truth goes up on the screen.
One number, three seconds
Your name, carried between matches and shared across all six sports. It appears only when it moves, for three seconds, and then it is gone. It never tells you whether a call was believed, only what the night has cost you so far.
What gets an umpire caught is not being wrong. It is being wrong in the same direction every time.
Four of them. None is money.
An envelope makes the umpire a criminal, and then the only interesting question, would you?, has been answered for you. Instead: a tournament that needs a name in the final, a panel marking whether anything happened, a player you refereed badly last season, and your own first wrong call pulling you to even it up.
The reward is always for the result, never for the lie.
What it is, honestly
Desktop game · single player · free, nothing to buy
Release date 1 November 2026
Your system
Referee.For.Fun.dmg · 444 MB · Apple Silicon & Intel · macOS 11 or later
SHA-256 16fe09e7037e30f5150d1d1f89bfe23f2662a8392609c63af6f226d614aeb86a
Your system
Referee.For.Fun.exe · 516 MB · 64-bit · Windows 10 and 11
SHA-256 b8be66a3d484658d9f3be9a455f5406e63ea6247e93a814a1a50f45a237d72b5
No launcher, no account, no telemetry. Your save never leaves your machine. Older builds
Unsigned, not unsafe
Referee For Fun is made by one person, not a company with an Apple Developer certificate and a Microsoft signing key, so both systems say they cannot check who made it. You only have to tell them once. The source is on GitHub if you would rather read it first.
On macOS 15 Sequoia and later, right-click → Open no longer gets past Gatekeeper; the way through is System Settings. For older versions see below.
Open the .dmg, drag Referee For Fun to Applications and open it. macOS stops it. Click Done.
Open System Settings → Privacy & Security and scroll to Security. Click Open Anyway.
Confirm with Open Anyway and your password. From now on it opens with a normal double-click.
The Open Anyway button only stays in Privacy & Security for about an hour after macOS blocks the app. If it is not there, open the app once more, click Done, and look again.
On macOS Big Sur to Sonoma, right-click the app in Applications and choose Open, then Open again in the dialog. That is all.
From the Terminal, on any version, this removes the download flag so the first launch is not stopped at all: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Referee For Fun.app"
There is no installer: the .exe is the whole game. Put it in a folder of its own. It writes its save next to your user profile, not beside itself.
Your browser may say the file isn’t commonly downloaded. Choose Keep (in Edge, under the “…” menu).
Run it. Microsoft Defender SmartScreen appears. Click More info.
The publisher shows as unknown. Click Run anyway. Windows remembers, and asks no more.
Every build, still downloadable
Read from the project's GitHub releases, refreshed every few minutes, so it is never behind the game.
A challenge is played out on the court. The court empties, the ball flies its path again with a yellow trail while the camera chases it, the picture cuts to the arena's big screen, and then dives onto the mark beside the line, where the OFFICIAL REVIEW pill flips to IN or OUT. The crowd claps in time while it waits, and the replays of your worst calls at the final whistle play the same way. Fixed: table tennis points that froze for 22 seconds when a return dropped through the floor.
The stands no longer move as one. Everybody in the crowd now reacts in their own way: some jump once, some bounce two or three times, some just get up and clap, a few are late, and they sit back down one by one. Between rallies people turn to the person next to them and lean in, so nobody in the stands is frozen.
Every sport has somewhere to be played. Every venue is now a building modelled for the game, with the crowd seated on its own steps: badminton climbs to an arena drawn from the Axiata Arena, volleyball to an exhibition hall after MITEC, sepak takraw to a hall drawn from Stadium Titiwangsa, table tennis to a domed bowl after Malawati Stadium. Tennis is an open-air stadium and beach volleyball is played under a photographed beach sky.
Realistic players, officials and crowd, with rackets, balls and a tournament chair to match, and a stroke for every situation in every sport.
The crowd was facing the wrong way: the seats a quarter turn out and the people in them with their backs to the play. Fixed, along with a challenge that could start after you had been thrown off. Adds a credits screen and a setting for how much of the hall to draw.
Real see-through nets at each sport's own mesh size, an 80-triangle arena chair the crowd actually sits in, tennis and table tennis lit like the rest, and line judges who put their arms down after an OUT.
First public build. Six sports from the umpire's chair: badminton, beach volleyball, indoor volleyball, tennis, table tennis and sepak takraw.
Free, one file, no account. The hall is already full.
On a phone? The game is for a Mac or a Windows PC. Open referee-for-fun.pages.dev/download on your computer and the right build starts by itself.