Show HN: Scorecard.gg – minimalist scoring tool for your favorite board games (opens in new tab)

I tried Scrabble on my phone in portrait mode (which IMO is the use case you should be optimizing for) and am finding it not very usable. Not trying to be overly negative, but here are some things I'm seeing:

- Even with 2 players seeing everyone's score requires horizontal scrolling, which is annoying.

- In addition, the scrollbars seems to only appear when a cell is selected. And even then it only actually works with 2 finger scrolling. And even then, it is inconsistent.

- Having to double tap in to enter a score is annoying.

- Not sure what the "play" column is for. If it's intended to be the word played by that player, then it's too small for many words, and it doesn't even make sense for many turns (e.g. player is connecting existing words, or passing). Furthermore, IME most people don't bother keeping track of previous turns words.

My $.02 on improving, since I hate non-constructive criticism:

Make each player some sort of bottom tab, with their score visible. Clicking the player can show all the details.

Drop the "play" column.

Auto-prompt for next players score, don't make me find the right cell and double click into it. Provide special operations for editing previous scores or marking turns as passed, challenged, etc.

Hi @thomaspark,

Played with the app. Created a 3 min video feedback of my experience using it.

https://www.loom.com/share/fb0fe0ec8e3b439db92eb4a6c5794931?...

I hope you find it useful. Really liked the hidden URL feature :) If you don't find it useful, please disregard the video.

Thanks and happy building!!

Can I contribute games I'd like to add? Or maybe run a local version customized for the games my group plays?

I like the idea and the website looks great and functional. Except on mobile. Yahtzee is nigh unusable on an iPhone Mini. I don’t think anyone in my groups would go for having a laptop on the table near us, we’d sooner grab a new blank paper and scribble on it.

Could you add a general "game" for round-based games?

The current Scrabble score-card is close, but it would be nice to have a per-round score and a running total as columns.

This project was born out of regular games of Dutch Blitz.

For gaming, existing scoring apps had more complexity (and friction) than I was after. I wanted something quick & dirty.

I ended up on Google Sheets with some simple formulas. Other groups also started using it. It seemed to be something I could generalize with a bit more work, and here we are.

Welcome any and all feedback.

I think the fundamental problem with a site like this is that the games that could really do with assistance for scoring need more than this, and the thing I really want (a reminder of how things score) just isn’t there for other games. For example, Caverna and Agricola aren’t hard to score, but being able to point everybody to something that makes it visible how end game scoring works would be really useful. Conversely I would love a CV based scoring app for A Feast For Odin because that is a game where it is easy to miscount tiles, but that’s beyond what a site like this is aiming to do.

Love the minimalist look of the cards. I'll try this out in the coming days.

As you add additional games, I would include a search bar on the main page.

For random point-tracking, I keep going back to Rounds: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.publicobje...

It's one of the few to escape the Excel-but-simpler model, and due to that and the input wheel it's much quicker for doing stuff out of order or making adjustments, and that's super common for me.

Feedback: looks great, but would also be great to also add stylus compatibility, sketch/doodle mode, add players mid-game, pressure sensitivity, sleep and wake persistence capability, indefinite data persistence, unlimited viewing angle, unlimited battery life, and be storable in the game box indefinitely with a cheap, disposable stylus.

Awesome idea, definitely something I would use because I play yahtzee a lot randomly. But when I play board games I only have my phone so mobile version needs a lot of work. I have to imagine most people are the same so in my opinion you should think about that as default usecase when thinking of UI. Will follow the project. Nice work

I like minimalist utility sites like this. Will try this out on my next game of Parks.

FYI looks like icons for first player and season bonus aren't available on the Parks scorecard. https://scorecard.gg/games/parks/

Is there any way to add unlisted games? This looks like a simple spreadsheet type thing, unless I'm missing some key detail.

I assume each game's scorecard is stored as json somewhere, or is a javascript object with the rows being preset icons/strings. Looks very useful.

I've made https://leaderboardhq.com for general scorekeeping. Main use case was a scoreboard that kept track of rounds and sets.

Such a cool idea, and well executed. Had you considered adding descriptions or "How to play" on each game's scorecard page? Could be a nice addition

I use Pointedly on iOS, but this is neat as well. Not all games work well with a generic scoring app, and I’ll keep this in mind for our next session.

Please add 7 Wonder: Duel also.

The mobile UX could be made a little nicer by adding inputmode="numeric" and maybe pattern="\d*" to the fields that take a numeric score

Glad to see Wingspan featured prominently! I love that game

Feedback:

Cell input should be a number type so mobile keyboard defaults to numbers.

Entry cells should scroll separately from row headers.

Can't remove players.

Plus and minus buttons on cell entry would be nice.

(I tried the Wingspan one)

Mosaic will be useful. Can't believe the retail version didn't come with anything to track score.

disappointed by the end of the first screenshot starting with "John, Paul, George, Ri..."

In yahtzee you should get the bonus when you have 63 points OR over.

Cribbage could make a nice addition

I will do this with ChatGPT in the future. No need to type or use a calculator or anything like that anymore.

Sad that it's only simpler games. Like when I really need an app or paper it's for something like 18xx games. At this level 80% of the games id do in my head and the rest are just as easy with the calculator app

I made a very minimal[0] phone only score board. Scores are increased by scrolling, or holding to set it to a specific value.

Pressing the 'settings' tab enables modes for games like 'Whist' that involve betting, as well as configuring the number of players.

[0] https://score.feud.today/