Goals

Use this guide to build a multi-week goal for the people in your household, and to understand what you see if you're in one.

Before you begin

Goals need Famify Premium to start — see Free and Premium. You should already know how quests and rewards work, since a goal is built entirely out of quests you're already setting — see Quests and Rewards.

Game Masters build and manage goals from Family, then Goals. Players see their own from a card on Home, and can open one for the full picture.

What a goal is

A goal is a time-boxed target a Game Master builds out of a small shared list of objectives — things like "20 quests" or "a 7-day streak" — and runs for 2 to 20 weeks. A goal can hold up to 8 objectives and 12 participants.

The objective list is the same for everyone in the goal. What differs per Player is how many of those objectives they personally have to finish, and what real-world prize they get for it. That's deliberate: people in one household work at different paces, and nobody should be held to the same finish line just because they're chasing the same list, so the Game Master sets each Player's own target — a count of objectives, never higher than the number the goal has — and their own prize.

Building a goal

Family, then Goals, then New goal opens on a draft, not a blank form. As soon as your roster loads, every Player is checked in as a participant and the app immediately asks for a sizing suggestion — you can add or remove people, including yourself as a Game Master, before it settles.

The suggestion sets the objective list and a starting target for each participant. You don't approve it step by step: a summary line above the objectives ("We suggest 4 objectives, finish 3" or, if targets differ, "each player's target is set below") stands in for a review screen, and the objectives themselves are shown straight away with their sliders — Hide objectives folds them away if you'd rather not see them. Every number — weeks, each objective's count, each Player's target, each prize — is a slider or field you can move before saving.

Changing who's in the goal or how long it runs asks for a fresh suggestion, which replaces the objective list and every participant's target with newly-sized ones. Anything you'd already hand-tuned on those sliders is lost; only each participant's reward choice survives. Set participants and weeks first, then fine-tune objectives and targets last.

A feasibility warning (below) is shown live as you edit the draft, but it's information for you to act on, not a lock — nothing about the app forces you to resolve a warning before saving, since it's your household to run as you see fit.

Where the suggested numbers come from

Famify sizes the draft to what the chosen participants have actually been doing — roughly their last four weeks of approved quests and their best recent streak — and paces the shared objectives to the fastest of them. Each Player's own target is then scaled to their own pace: the fastest Player is asked for every objective on the list, everyone else for a share of it, so a shared list still asks different amounts of different Players.

A Player (or household) with less than two weeks of history doesn't have enough to size from. When that happens, the builder falls back to a fixed starting point — not a read on that household — and says so on screen. The same fallback covers a household with nobody's quest history at all.

If sizing itself fails to load, the app tells you and the sliders stay usable — you can still build a goal entirely by hand.

Objectives and progress

An objective is one of three kinds:

• CATEGORY — a number of approved quests in one category (Kitchen, Tidying, and so on).
• TOTAL — a number of approved quests, any category.
• STREAK — a run of consecutive days with an approved quest, counted the same way your regular daily streak is — see Streaks and trophies for the neutral-day rule it inherits.

Progress only moves on approval, same as XP and gold. A submitted-but-unreviewed quest doesn't touch a goal yet, and a quest completed by someone who isn't a participant in the goal never touches it either.

A STREAK objective's progress is a best-ever run within the goal, not your current one: once you've banked a 5-day run inside the goal, breaking your streak the next day doesn't take that 5 back. It only rises.

Whatever your regular daily streak already is when a goal starts, its STREAK objective starts at zero — it only counts consecutive days from the goal's own start date onward, so a 40-day streak you were already carrying doesn't give you a head start.

A participant finishes the goal by finishing their target number of objectives — any target the Game Master set, capped at how many objectives the goal has. Reaching it doesn't require finishing every objective on the list, just enough of them.

Feasibility warnings

Every Player's row — in the builder, before you've saved anything, and on every saved goal afterward — shows one of three states, recomputed from the household's current quest supply each time it's read:

• On track — no warning.
• Unreachable — this Player can't reach their target with what's currently available. The warning names what's short: which objective, how many completions it still needs, and how many are actually possible before the deadline. Two fixes sit on the warning itself: Add a recurring quest creates a small daily quest addressed just to that Player — needing no review, worth 10 XP — in whichever category is actually short, or uncategorised if the shortfall is a TOTAL or STREAK objective with no category to aim at. Add 2 weeks pushes the deadline out instead of adding supply.
• Finishable early — the opposite problem: this Player could finish well before halfway through the goal. It's shown so you know the deadline isn't doing much work, but it's purely informational — it never badges, counts, or notifies anyone.

In the builder this is a live preview against your draft, so you see it before you save anything. On a saved goal it's the same computation, shown three ways: a warning badge on the goal's row on the Goals list, the full notice with both fixes on the goal's own screen, and a count of goals currently affected on the Family hub's Goals tile. Only Unreachable drives any of these — Finishable early never does.

Pace: whether they're actually doing it

A feasibility warning answers one question — do the quests exist? It says nothing about whether anyone is doing them, so the commonest failure was invisible: a Player with plenty available who simply isn't working reads as On track right up until the supply runs out and they flip to Unreachable.

Under each Player's row you may now also see "At this rate Emma finishes 1 of 3." That's their own rate so far, projected to the deadline. Seeing it next to On track is the point: the quests are there, and they aren't being done. It's information, not an alarm — nothing is pushed, and there's no badge or count anywhere.

It's deliberately silent in three cases:

• Early on. Nothing appears until at least 7 days have passed and at least a quarter of the goal has gone, whichever comes later. Seven because households run on weekly rhythms — one that does its chores at the weekend looks idle on a Thursday, and a shorter sample would call a perfectly ordinary Player behind.
• Once they've finished. There's nothing left to project.
• When the goal is already unreachable. That warning covers it, and a second one beside it would only dilute the first.

It never latches: a good week raises the rate and the projection climbs back on its own.

One thing does act on it. On the goal's own screen a Game Master is offered a three-day Power Weekend — double XP and gold on everyone's quests — while at least one Player in that goal is behind their pace. It's one tap, it names who's behind, and it's the only lever here that helps: Add a recurring quest and Add 2 weeks both add supply, and a Player who's behind already has supply they aren't using.

The offer is a Game Master's alone; nobody is notified that it appeared. It's one per goal rather than one per Player, because an event covers the whole household. It's hidden while an event is already running, and gone once the goal has ended or been closed. It never doubles real rewards or the goal prize — see Events.

Notifications

Unreachable pushes only to Game Masters, never to the Player. It escalates rather than firing the moment a Player goes unreachable, because on day one of a goal you've written the objectives and not yet the quests that feed them, so it's correctly unreachable and a push then would just interrupt your setup.

Nothing is sent before the goal is halfway through its window. From halfway, a Game Master gets one push naming the goal and how many objectives across the household can't be finished. If it's still unreachable at 85% of the way through, or with three days left, whichever comes first, an urgent version follows. One out-of-reach Player is enough to trigger either — it doesn't matter which one. Once every participant becomes reachable again, the ladder resets, so a goal that breaks, gets fixed, and breaks again escalates from the start a second time.

A second push fires the moment a Player crosses their target with a real-world prize attached — every Game Master and the Owner get it, naming the Player and the prize, so whoever has to go buy the bike hears about it right away instead of finding out next time they open Payouts. It's tied to the prize, not to finishing: a goal with no prize, or a Game Master finishing their own goal, sends nothing beyond the Player's own confirmation — see below. See Notifications for the full list of what's sent and to whom.

A photo of the prize

🚲 is a bicycle. It isn't the bicycle in the shop window a Player has been walking past for a month, so a goal can carry a photo of the real thing instead.

Open the goal from Family, then Goals, and tap the photo tile. Pick from your camera roll and it uploads; tap it again to replace it, or remove it. Your phone shrinks the picture first — nothing larger than 1200px goes up, so a camera original of several megabytes arrives as a couple of hundred kilobytes.

The photo shows behind the title on the Player's Home card and on their goal screen. Without one, both look exactly as they did before.

You can only add a photo to a goal that already exists, not while you're building one — a goal needs to be saved before there's anywhere to put the picture. Create it, then open it.

If you don't see the photo tile, this household's app isn't set up to store pictures. It needs somewhere to keep them, which is configured once for the whole installation. Everything else about a goal works the same without it.

Following a goal as a player

Open your goal from the card on Home. At the top is a bar running toward your prize, which sits at the end of it — your photo if the goal has one, otherwise its emoji.

The bar moves a little every time a quest is approved, not only when you finish a whole objective. A part-finished objective still counts for its share, so a good day shows up the same day. The notches along the bar are the objectives you have to finish on the way — the last one is the prize itself. The objectives are listed underneath with their own progress bars, and a finished one dims rather than disappearing, so you can see how far you've come.

Under the bar you'll sometimes see a line like "About 2 a week from here." That's the rate that would get you to your target in the time left — it's there to be useful, not to tell you off. Inside the last week it switches to a per-day number, since "a week from here" stops meaning much at that point.

Progress, and one Player finishing early

Each participant's target, progress, and prize are their own. One Player reaching their target doesn't end the goal for anyone else in it — their row shows complete while the rest keep going. If a real-world prize is attached, it's recorded the moment they cross their target, the same way a quest's real reward is recorded on approval (see Rewards) — it shows up under Payouts from then on.

Once everyone in the goal has crossed their target, the goal itself ends right away — you don't have to wait for the deadline, and you don't have to wait for the background check either (see below). It moves straight to the same ended state a deadline produces, so Close goal is available immediately. The Goals list and a goal's own screen mark it Fulfilled rather than the generic ended look a goal gets when the clock simply ran out with a Player still short — that one reads Time's up instead. Both are the same underlying status; only whether every participant's row shows complete tells them apart.

An event doesn't change a goal's prize. A goal promising a bike still promises one bike, whatever event is running. The prize is a thing you agreed on, not an amount to be multiplied — and a goal usually outlives the event anyway. Quests inside the goal still pay their own boosted XP and gold; see Events and Rewards.

An event can double a quest's real reward, but only if the Game Master ticked Also double real rewards when starting it. That switch is separate from the event type and starts off, so a Power Weekend on its own leaves what you owe alone.

Editing a goal

Open a goal from the Goals list and tap Edit goal. You can change the title, the emoji, each objective's count, how many objectives each Player has to finish, and each Player's prize. Counts and targets move in both directions — a goal you sized too easy is as fixable as one you sized too hard.

Raising a count doesn't take anything back. A Player who has finished 15 of 20 and gets re-aimed at 40 still has their 15; the finish line moved, the work didn't disappear.

Four things an edit can never do:

• Remove an objective, or change what one asks for. Progress is recorded against each objective individually, so turning "5 × Kitchen" into "5 × Pets" would silently hand a Player credit for pet chores they never did. Add another objective instead — that's always allowed.
• Remove a Player from the goal.
• Pull the deadline in. It can only move later.
• Move the target of a Player who has already finished. Their prize is already recorded as owed on Payouts, so their target is fixed — in both directions. Their prize itself can still be corrected, so "Bike" can become "Blue bike".

Lowering a target below what a Player has already done finishes them immediately. If Emma has completed 2 objectives and you drop her target to 2, she's done the moment you save, and her prize is recorded as owed. The app warns you before saving, because it can't be undone.

Players are told when a goal gets harder. Raising a count or a target sends a notification to the Players it affects — and only them. If you raise one Player's target, the others hear nothing, and a Player who has already finished is never told, because a raised count can't reach them. When you save a change like this, the app offers a Tell the players switch, on by default. Turn it off if you're fixing your own slip minutes after creating the goal, before anyone has looked at it.

Changing a prize, a title or an emoji is never treated as making the goal harder, and never notifies anyone.

While you're editing, the feasibility warning under each Player updates against the change you're making, counting what they've already banked — so you can see a raised count tipping someone into "can't be finished in time" before you commit to it.

A closed goal can't be edited at all — the Edit goal button disappears once it's closed.

Add a player brings someone new into a goal that's already running. They're held to the same objective list as everyone else, with their own target and their own prize — and they start from zero, with the goal's clock already part-way through, so bear in mind what's realistically left for them. It needs Premium, since a new Player is a new commitment, and a goal holds at most 12 participants.

Add 2 weeks pushes the deadline out. It's available while a goal is running and after it's ended (but not once it's closed) — extending an ended goal brings it back to active, which is how you give a Player who came close more time rather than closing them out.

Give it anyway appears once a goal has ended, next to each Player who didn't reach their target. It records their prize as owed on Payouts exactly as reaching the target would, and it can't be undone. A Player who already finished doesn't get the button — they've been paid.

Close goal is only available once a goal has ended. Closing locks it in: nobody still short can be given their prize, and the deadline can no longer be pushed out — so give out anything you mean to give, and extend if you're going to, before you close.

Delete goal removes it for everyone. Progress already banked stays on the ledger — a prize already recorded stays owed — but the goal itself is gone.

A goal doesn't flip from running to ended the instant its deadline passes — a background check every 15 minutes or so is what actually does it, so it can take a few minutes for a goal past its deadline to show as ended and offer "Give it anyway." A goal every participant has already finished doesn't wait on that check at all — see Progress, and one Player finishing early above.

If your subscription lapses

A lapsed household keeps every goal it already started — nothing is deleted, and nothing stops. Quests still count toward objectives, warnings still fire, and a prize still gets recorded the moment a Player reaches their target through ordinary play. The only things Premium gates are starting a new goal and adding a new Player to one that's already running.

Troubleshooting

A quest was approved and progress didn't move. Check three things: the quest's category matches a CATEGORY objective (a Kitchen quest never counts toward a Tidying objective), the quest is actually approved and not still sitting in Pending, and the Player is a participant in that goal at all — a quest completed by someone not in the goal never touches it.

A warning won't clear. Unreachable is recalculated from the household's live quest supply every time the goal is read — it clears itself once there's enough supply again, most often after using "Add a recurring quest," or after a Player is assigned more quests in the category an objective needs. Finishable early isn't something to clear at all — it's informational, and the app never asks you to act on it.

A prize isn't on Payouts. A goal's real reward is only recorded once that Player's own progress reaches their own target — check their progress, not the goal's overall state. If the Game Master or household Owner is a participant in their own goal, no entry is created for them either, same as a quest's real reward: prizes only ever flow from a Game Master to a Player.

No push arrived when a Player finished. Check first whether a prize was actually filed — no prize on the goal, or a Game Master finishing their own goal, means nothing beyond the Player's own confirmation is sent, by design. Otherwise check the Game Master's own notification switch for it; see Notifications.

A Player fell short and the goal ended. Once a goal's deadline passes it stops accepting new progress, but it isn't locked yet — open it and use "Give it anyway" on that Player's row to record their prize regardless. That option disappears once you use Close goal, so do this first if you mean to do it at all.

A goal reads Fulfilled even though I can still see it on the list. That's expected — Fulfilled means every participant crossed their target, not that the goal has been closed out. It stays visible, offering Close goal, until you close it.

My streak objective didn't drop after I broke my streak. It isn't meant to — a STREAK objective keeps your best run inside the goal, not your current one. It only moves up.

I changed the weeks slider (or who's in the goal) and my hand-tuned objectives or targets reset. That's expected — either change re-sizes the whole draft from a fresh suggestion. Only each participant's reward choice is kept. Settle on participants and length first, then adjust objectives and targets.

Changing or removing a quest is refused, mentioning a goal. A running goal may depend on that quest to keep an objective reachable for one of its participants — recategorizing it, or removing it, would push that objective out of reach. The app names the goal and offers to proceed anyway; see Quests.

The photo tile isn't there. This household's app isn't set up to store pictures. That's configured once for the whole installation, not per household, so there's nothing you can change in the app — everything else about the goal works without it.

A photo I could see has stopped loading. The link a photo is shown through lasts a week. Leaving the screen and coming back reissues it. If it stays broken, remove the photo and add it again.