Keep score

A scorepad that lives on the table

Paper works until someone adds a column wrong, and phone note apps are worse — you end up doing the arithmetic anyway. This is a scorepad for card and board games: add the players, enter each round, and it keeps the running totals and tells you who won.

What it does

• Any number of players, added at any point — join someone mid-game and they simply start from zero.
• Round-by-round entry with plus and minus buttons, so a score can be nudged without opening a keyboard.
• Quick-add buttons for the common scores in a game. Qwirkle, for example, gets 2 through 6 and a Qwirkle button worth twelve.
• Entry order, leader order or your own order — sort the cards by who joined or by who is winning, or drag them into whatever order the table is sitting in. Dragging works by touch as well as with a mouse, and the handle also responds to the arrow keys.
• Two cards a row on a tablet once there are three or more players, so a full table of scores fits on the screen instead of running off the bottom of it. A phone keeps the single column.
• Full-screen mode, which drops the site navigation so a phone propped against the table shows nothing but scores.
• A winner screen when you end the game, with the final totals.
• Saved games, for accounts that have been granted Scorepad history — end a game, save it, and the final standings are kept against the account rather than disappearing with the tab.
• A running player record built from those saved games: played, won, drawn, lost and a win rate per player, ranked. Players are matched on name alone, so the same name is the same person however it was capitalised, and a game whose top score was shared counts as a draw for everyone who shared it. The record can be narrowed to a single game, so a Qwirkle record is not diluted by a season of darts.

Games

Qwirkle, Scrabble, Rummikub, Yahtzee and Cribbage are set up already, and you can add your own game by name. The game you pick only changes the label and the quick-add buttons — scoring itself is plain addition, so it works for anything you can put a number against, including darts, pub quizzes and card games nobody has written rules for.

Privacy

Scores are held in the page while you use it. Nothing is sent to a server and nothing is saved between visits, so reloading the tab starts a fresh game.

The one exception is saving a finished game, which only signed-in accounts granted Scorepad history can do and which never happens on its own: you press the button on the winner screen, and the game name, the date and the final totals are stored against your account. Nothing about a game in progress is sent anywhere, and a saved game can be deleted from the list on this page at any time. The player record is worked out in the page from your own saved games and nobody else's — there is nothing shared or compared between accounts.