Fantasy Rowing is a free prediction game for rowing fans, on iOS and Android. Before a regatta starts you pick the crews you think will win, then earn points as the results come in and compete on a live leaderboard against friends, clubmates and everyone else playing. It covers the events rowing people actually argue about: Henley Royal Regatta (where it began as “Fantasy Henley”), the World Rowing Championships, the U23 World Championships, the Boat Race and the Head of the Charles.

I built it as a solo project from concept to store: Flutter on the front end, PostgreSQL behind it, with real-time leaderboards and scoring on top of race schedules, crew data and results processing.

Who it’s for

Rowers, coaches, parents on the bank and armchair umpires. The private leagues are the part that spreads it: a club, an office or a group chat sets one up, and suddenly a Thursday heat at Henley matters to thirty people who would otherwise have checked the results on Sunday.

How it works

Pick. For each event you select the crews you back. Predictions lock when racing begins, so there’s no editing after the first race has gone off.
Score. Points are awarded as each result is confirmed. At a multi-day regatta a crew keeps earning as it progresses through the draw, which is what makes the later rounds tense.
Compete. Live leaderboards, updated as results land, for the overall game and for every private league you’re in.

The game is free and stays free. There are optional Regatta and Season passes for extras, but they never buy an advantage: everyone scores on the same rules.

Results

Top 50 in the App Store’s Sports category, peaking at #53 in 2025.
202% year-on-year user growth, all organic — no paid marketing, just the rowing community passing it on.
Over 60% of surveyed users in 2025 said they watched races they wouldn’t otherwise have watched. That’s the number I care most about: the app measurably increases viewership at events like Henley Royal Regatta.
Rated 5.0 on the App Store (43 ratings, UK) and 5.0 on Google Play as of September 2026.

How it was built

Launch week in 2023 was deliberately lean: ship the core loop, then iterate daily on real feedback. Prediction comparison, multiple racing formats and a series of UI changes all came from watching how people actually used it during a live regatta.

The hard problems were the ones you’d expect from a live-event product: keeping data in sync while racing is happening, handling the spike in traffic on event weekends, keeping iOS and Android consistent from one codebase, and onboarding both casual and committed fans without either group feeling lost. Each event has its own format — a knock-out draw at Henley, heats and finals at a World Championships, a single race at the Boat Race — so the scoring engine had to be general enough to describe all of them without the game feeling different at each.

“Over 60% of surveyed users said they watched races they wouldn’t have otherwise watched as a result of the app.”

Elsewhere

Fantasy Rowing on the App Store and on Google Play
RowingRelated’s interview about Fantasy Rowing
Related: TapDown for finding the World Rowing results the game scores from, and WinterRowingLeague for the other half of the season.

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