How Plotluck actually works, in one page.
Open the app and type your name. Choose Movies or TV shows, then tap Start a room — that creates a fresh room with a 4-letter code and drops you straight into the deck.
To join a room someone else started, either tap the invite link they sent you (it fills the code in automatically) or type the 4-letter code into the "join one" box on the landing screen and tap Join.
Every room gets a short, random 4-character code — that's how your group finds each other. It only uses letters and numbers that are hard to mix up (no 0/O or 1/I), so reading it out loud or texting it works cleanly. Sharing the code — or the invite link, which is just the code baked into a URL — is the whole invite flow. There's nothing else to set up.
Everyone in the room swipes through the same deck of movies or shows — like the ones you'd watch, pass on the rest. As you go, Plotluck checks who's liked what.
Matches show up in your matches list as you go. If you still can't settle on one, use the decider (a head-to-head bracket, or the wheel) to pick a winner from your matches — see "What makes it good" on the homepage.
A room is one movie night — it's built around tonight's swipes and tonight's pick, and it's cleaned up automatically after 30 days of no activity.
A crew ("keep the crew together") is a standing group you come back to night after night. It has its own short join code and a shared feed showing who's watched what, matched on what, and picked for movie night — so you don't have to re-invite the same friends every single time. Crews are cleaned up after 90 days of no activity.
Tap the 📺 button in the room to open "What's on tonight's TV?" and pick the streaming services actually available on the screen you're watching on. That choice is shared across the whole room — everyone swipes the same filtered deck, so anything that matches is guaranteed to be something you can actually press play on.
Tap Any streaming service to only see titles that are streamable somewhere (skipping rental/purchase-only titles), or Everything to turn the filter off completely and see the full catalogue.
Your likes and taste live under a random ID stored on the device you're using — there's no account to log into elsewhere. To carry that taste to a new phone or browser, open Sync your taste (the ↻ link on the landing screen) and you'll see a 6-character code for your current device. On the new device, open the same panel, enter that code, and tap Restore — your likes, blocks, and taste move over.
Open Sync your taste and tap 🗑 Delete my data. That permanently removes your taste profile (likes, blocked titles, watch history, reviews) from the server and clears it from this device. It doesn't delete rooms you're currently in — leave those separately, or let them expire after 30 days of inactivity. See the Privacy Policy for the full picture of what's stored.
A few common reasons:
Plotluck works as an installable app (PWA) — no app store needed.
Once installed, it opens straight into the app — full screen, no browser chrome — and can send you a notification when your group locks in tonight's pick, if you turn notifications on.