Help
Where the planner cannot do something you would reasonably expect, that is here too.
Plan your first week
Five steps, start to finish. Nothing to sign up for, and nothing is lost if you close the tab halfway.
- On Pick shows, find something you would hate to miss. Press Add on its row and choose Must, Want, Would or Won't.
- On Shape your days, turn on the days you can actually get out, and set From and Until on each one.
- Still on that page, use Add a commitment for anything already in your calendar — dinner, a shift, meeting someone.
- On Your plan, press Build my Fringe. Several plans come back; the first one is readable before the last one lands.
- Choose the column that suits you, then Print or save as PDF to take it with you.
In a hurry: the Welcome page offers four ready-made weeks — Festival sampler, Easy evenings, Family matinee and Late-night laughs. Each one fills in some shows and days to start from, and you can change anything in it. See an example plan on Your plan loads the Festival sampler.
The four steps across the top are a stepper, not a queue: you can jump between them in any order. Once you have started, the strip under them keeps a running count of where you stand.
Find shows worth your time
The program is the festival's own: 210 shows, 1,582 performances across 37 venues and 11 days.
Search
Search shows, companies, venues also matches a genre, a content warning and the words in a blurb. The line beside it counts what survives — Showing 27 of 210.
Narrow it down
The row of words under the search box switches between Picked, All and one priority at a time. Under that, five menus: Genre, Area, Playing on, Length and Price.
Clear filters appears as soon as any of those five, or a content-warning group below, is set, and clears the lot. It does not change which priority row you are looking at.
Leave out what you would rather not see
Leave out shows with holds eight groups: sexual violence; sex and nudity; strong language; violence; death, grief and suicide; mental illness; drugs and alcohol; and strobe, haze and loud noise. Turn one on and every show carrying a warning in that group drops out of the list.
The groups are ours. The wording inside a show is the festival's: open a row with the arrow at its end and you get the blurb, the dates, and Content warnings, in the festival's own words — the festival's own phrases, unedited.
Say how much you want it
- Must
- Make it happen if there is any clean way to fit it.
- Want
- Yes, as long as it doesn't cost you a must-see.
- Would
- Nice extra if there is room after musts and wants.
- Won't
- Not this time. We'll leave it out.
Your must-sees are settled before anything else is looked at, whichever plan style you are reading. If too much is competing, moving one must-see down to a want frees the week more than any other single change.
Your shows on the same page opens onto everything you have marked, so you can re-rank the lot without scrolling the program.
See a show twice
Once a show is on your list its row grows a Times counter. 1 = see it once; you can go up to 4. A second visit is worth less to the plan than a first, so it gives way to a show you have not seen at all.
Say when you're free
One window a day
Every festival day has a checkbox and a From and Until. A day that is off gets nothing scheduled on it. The bar beside each day draws that window on a 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. clock, with the heavy mark at midnight, so you can see which days are wide and which are a sliver before reading a single time.
Under Set every day at once there are three buttons that shape the whole festival: Apply after-work evenings, Apply weekend focus and Apply late-night run. Reset days puts them back.
One window per day, not two. If you are free 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and again from 7 p.m., there is no way to say that directly. Set the wider window and add a commitment over the middle of it — that is the same thing to the planner, and it is the only way to express it today.
Nights that run past midnight
A time field cannot say whether 1:00 is before your start or after it. When the two readings genuinely differ, a runs past midnight checkbox appears beside the times. Tick it and Until 1:00 means 1 a.m. the following morning; the day's bar stretches to match.
Anywhere a time lands after midnight, the planner writes it out — 12:20 a.m. (next day) — rather than leaving you to work out which night it belongs to.
Things already in your calendar
Add a commitment on any open day. Give it a name, a start and an end. Where is it takes Doesn't matter, In a particular area or At a particular venue.
A commitment with no place blocks the time and nothing else. Give it an area or a venue and the walk there and back is counted too, so the show before it and the show after it have to be reachable.
A day or a commitment that ends before it starts is called out where you typed it, and nothing will build until it is fixed.
Two settings at the bottom
Breathing room between shows is minutes on top of the walk — time for a snack, a washroom, or stopping to watch a busker. Zero up to an hour.
Ticket budget is a cap on what the whole plan costs. Leave it blank and cost is ignored entirely.
Choose between the plans you're offered
Build my Fringe searches four ways at once and hands you the results side by side: Balanced, Fewest festival days, Least hanging around and Fewest shows per day.
Two styles can land on exactly the same week. When they do, the plan says so rather than showing you the same column twice.
Each column header names what that plan is and what makes it different. Choose a column to see that plan in full; the arrow keys move between them. The leftmost column is the baseline every comparison is phrased against.
When only one plan comes back there is no table to read. You get the same facts about that one week instead — days out, busiest day, waiting, getting around, and what it costs.
What each row means
- Must-sees
- How many of your must-sees this plan gets you, out of how many you asked for.
- Also seeing
- Your wants and woulds, added together.
- Only in this one
- Shows this column gets you that no other column does.
- Days out
- How many festival days it uses.
- Busiest day
- The most shows it puts into any single day.
- Waiting between shows
- Time standing around over the whole week, past the breathing room you asked for.
- Getting around
- What the week asks of you: trips by car or bus, walks between venues, and stays in the same building.
- Tight connections
- Handoffs where you have less slack than you asked for and have to leave promptly.
- Latest night
- When the last show of the whole week comes down.
- Tickets
- What the plan costs in total.
No cell is marked as the winner. Four of those rows have no better direction — fewer days out is not better than more, it is what somebody asked for — and picking a favourite in the rest would be the planner making your choice for you.
The two notes under the table
Compared with the leftmost plan lists what the column you chose does differently: more of a priority, fewer days, more waiting, a different cost.
Where this one is tight appears when something is only just working: a plan a little over the budget you set, connections tighter than the breathing room you asked for, walks that cross between neighbourhoods, or a venue off the festival grounds.
Read your day
Each day opens with its date and its verdict — how many shows, what they cost, and when you are done. Under that, the day in order.
- The time is the anchor. Every stop leads with when it starts, then the title, the venue and its area, the start and end, the price, and how much you wanted it.
- The walk belongs to the stop it leads into, on the line above it — for instance about 7 min on foot, all in the same corner of the grounds · 53 min spare. Same room, same building, on foot, or by car or bus: it says which, and how much slack you have when you get there.
- A tight connection says so on the end of that same line — TIGHT · 2 min short. Leave as it ends. It is in the plan because it is makeable, not because it is comfortable.
- Free time is time with nothing in it — 45 min free, and where to spend it. Only ever inside one day: the hours between the last show of one night and the first of the next are not a gap you are standing around in.
- A late finish is written 12:20 a.m. (next day), so a show that ends after midnight stays on the night it belongs to.
- Anything you booked shows up in the day where it sits, in the words you gave it.
- A performance that was sold out when we checked says so on the stop, and says it is worth asking at the door.
Change one thing without losing the rest
Any single stop can be nudged without rebuilding the week around it. On a stop, where the festival's own schedule allows it:
- Move to another day — a performance on a different day. This is the one you will reach for, because a Fringe show almost always plays once a day: in this year's program a show runs on eight days on average, and only thirteen of them ever play twice in one day.
- Find another time — a different performance on the same day. It only appears on the handful of shows that play twice that day; otherwise the stop says so instead: It plays once on Sun, Aug 16, so there's no other time that day. Even where it does appear, it will move the show to another day rather than give up if the second slot on the day cannot be made to fit.
- Drop this show — off the plan and off your list. On a show you asked to see more than once it reads Drop this visit and takes only that one.
They sit on the same line as the ticket tick under each stop, on every device. Where one is missing, the reason is beside it in a sentence about the festival — "It plays once on Fri, Aug 14, so there's no other time that day."
On any stretch of free time, I need this time turns the gap into a commitment. Name it, adjust the times, and press Work it in.
Nudges are offered only while the plan on screen is the plan your choices describe. If you have changed a show or a day since it was built, rebuild first — otherwise a nudge would be answering a question you have already moved past.
Nothing changes until you take it
The answer arrives under the stop or the gap you asked from, and the plan below it does not move. It comes back one of four ways:
- A clean swap
- It moved and nothing else had to.
- Possible, at a price
- It moved, and here is what the rest of the week pays for it.
- Only one way to do it
- There is a single arrangement that works, and this is the trade it makes.
- It can't move
- What is standing in the way, named. There is no plan to take, and that is an answer rather than a failure.
Take this plan keeps it. Keep what I had leaves the week exactly as it was — when there is nothing to take, that button reads Close instead.
Once you have taken an offer, the planner holds those performances where you put them while you keep nudging. Build my Fringe starts fresh and lets them go — the plan says how many it is holding, so you know what you would be giving up.
When a show won't fit
What didn't fit is one row per show: what it was, how much of it you asked for, why it did not make the plan, and what you can do about it. The reason is about that show, not about the week in general.
- It only plays on days you are not free.
- None of its performances land in a day you turned on. Open one of its days back on Shape your days.
- Every performance clashes with something you have already booked.
- Its performances run into a commitment. Move what you have booked and it can go in.
- Every performance that fits your days is already in this plan.
- You asked to see it more times than the festival is playing it inside your days.
- Every performance clashes with something else in your week, or with the walk to get there.
- There is no room left: each performance runs into another show, into the walk between venues, or into the breathing room you asked for.
- Every performance that fit your plan was sold out when we checked.
- Sold out in our snapshot, which carries the date it was taken. Held seats and door tickets do come back.
- It fits your schedule, but not your budget.
- The row says roughly how much more you would need.
- Another show you ranked higher took the slot.
- The time it needed went to something you wanted more.
Where forcing it in is possible at all — no room, sold out, over budget, or outranked — the row offers See it anyway. That builds the week again with this show ahead of everything else, and shows you what it costs before you take it.
The other reasons get no button, on purpose. A day you are not free and a commitment you have already made are facts about your life rather than rankings, and no amount of forcing moves them — so the row tells you the one change that actually would.
See the shape of your week
Week at a glance puts all 11 days side by side against the time of day. Each block is a real show at its real time, and its height is how long it runs.
The shading behind the blocks is how little room there is around that part of the day — from nothing planned at all, through an hour on its own, up to a stretch with no room in it. A block you booked yourself is drawn differently, and so is a walk of 15 minutes or more and a tight connection.
Point at a block, or tab through them, and the line under the grid names the show. Table gives you the same week as a table instead: shows per day, first curtain, last one out, whether the evening is free, what the getting around looks like, and what is on.
Once you have tickets
Mark I have tickets on a stop once you have actually bought for it. That is per performance, not per show: thirteen shows this year play twice in one day, and a ticket for the Saturday matinee says nothing about the evening.
A ticketed performance stops being something the planner may reconsider. It stays put through a rebuild, through changing your days, through dropping the show from your list, even through a day you turn off — the planner will build the rest of the week around it rather than move it. That is the point: you have paid, so it is no longer a preference.
If the festival later withdraws that performance, it does not disappear from your plan. It stays, marked as cancelled, with what you booked still legible, until you take it off yourself. You may be holding a receipt, and that is not ours to tidy away.
Removing a ticket is not the same as dropping the show. Removing the ticket says you no longer hold one; the show stays on your list and the planner is free to move it again.
Take it with you
Print or save as PDF opens your browser's own print dialog, where "Save as PDF" is one of the destinations. It works with no signal.
The paper is a different thing from the screen, not a screenshot of it. It carries what the screen leaves to a tap — every venue's street address, and the walk into each show — and drops everything that was there for choosing between plans. Each performance gets a Have tickets box, a Seen it box, and a rule long enough to write a seat number on. Days with nothing on them are left off, and nothing is filled with colour, because it is your ink.
Anything you have already marked I have tickets on screen comes out already ticked, so the paper agrees with the plan rather than asking you the same question twice.
Download this plan saves a file instead: the built week plus your shows, days, commitments and settings.
Keep your plan
Your draft saves in this browser as you go — the shows you picked, the days you are free, what you have booked, and your settings. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to press. Clearing this site's data in your browser clears the draft with it.
The badge on Your plan says Saved in this browser, or tells you that you have changed things and the plan on screen is behind.
To reach a draft from another device, add a passkey: Create passkey account, then Save draft to account and Load saved draft when you want it back. No passwords — your face, your fingerprint or your device PIN. Nothing syncs on its own; you choose when to save and when to load, and the local copy stays the one you are working in.
Only what you told us is saved to an account — your shows, days, commitments and settings — never the built week, which is rebuilt from those. If saving to an account is not available, the planner says so and your plan is still safe in this browser.
What the estimates actually mean
The planner is only as good as what it knows, and some of what it knows is approximate. Here is exactly how approximate.
Travel times are an estimate, not directions
There is no routing, no transit timetable, no traffic, no weather and no time of day in any of these numbers. For each leg the planner takes the first of these that applies:
- Same venue — you stay in the room; a few minutes to turn around.
- Shared site — two stages in one building, so it is a room change.
- Same area — a short walk inside one corner of the grounds, capped at 12 minutes.
- Off the grounds — a drive or a bus, counting parking and the walk at each end.
- A known route — three routes across the grounds checked by hand, where assuming you walk two sides of a block overstates a walk that is actually straight.
- Everything else — distance off the map, stretched for the grid, at a comfortable adult walking pace with festival crowds included, plus a few minutes to get out of one venue and into the next.
If a connection looks tight, it probably is. Treat the numbers as a plan that holds on an ordinary evening, not as a guarantee.
Area — the grouping the filter and commitments use — is ours too. The festival does not publish districts, so venues within a short walk of each other are grouped from their addresses in the program.
Five venues are off the festival grounds
The Nancy Power Theatre and The Lorne Cardinal Theatre, both at the Roxy on 124 Street; Woodcroft Hall; ArtsHub Ortona; and CKUA at the Alberta Hotel. All five sit north of the North Saskatchewan, so getting to any of them from Old Strathcona means crossing the river.
The planner treats them as a drive or a bus rather than a walk, and will not chain one to a tight slot. If your week includes one, budget more than the number says: parking on 124 Street in August is genuinely bad.
Seat counts are a snapshot
Availability was read on August 1, 2026 and started ageing that minute. A show's row says how many of its performances were sold out when we checked, and a performance with ten or fewer seats left says so.
Through the festival we re-read the schedule continuously, a slice at a time, so that every play has been checked within the hour. Open a show and each performance says when we last looked — "checked 20 minutes ago" is a fact about that play, not about the site. Nothing here is live: it is a page we read at a known moment, and the seat count could have moved since. Treat it as a strong hint and buy early for anything you would be sorry to miss.
A sold-out performance is not thrown out. It is the last thing the planner will reach for, so it only turns up when nothing else covers a show you said you must see — the Fringe releases held seats and sells at the door through the run, and dropping one on the strength of a stale reading would take away a show you could have got into. Where one is in your plan, the stop says so and says to ask at the venue.
Prices are what the program published
Ticket prices are the festival's own, including the service fee where one is charged — open a show's row and it says the price and how much of it is fees. They were captured with the rest of the schedule and can change. Confirm at the box office.
The budget is a cap, not a wall
Set a Ticket budget and every plan aims to come in under it. It may go over by a small amount — 3% of your budget, never less than $1 — when going over saves a show you wanted. The planner tells you the exact allowance while you set the budget, and says so on the plan when it has used it.
A show that only misses on price says so, and says roughly how much more you would need.