Score Buddy

Score Buddy is a scorekeeper, not a game. You do not play cards here: you keep the count while you play with your own cards, at your own table. It is the squared-paper scoresheet that always goes missing halfway through a game, except that it already knows what you are playing to, who is ahead, and how much further there is to go.

How it works

Pick a game from the list above and add the players by name. From then on a hand takes two taps: whoever scored, and how much. The standings reorder themselves after every entry, and a finished game stays in the history, so you can reopen it, settle an argument about one hand, or see who wins most often.

The useful part is that every game arrives already set up. The target, the direction of the standings and the quick buttons all differ by game, because eleven points at Scopa and two thousand at Burraco are not entered the same way. The direction matters most: at Scopa, Briscola, Burraco, UNO and Flip 7 the highest score wins, while at Scala 40 and Machiavelli the points are penalties and the lowest total takes it. That is the mistake generic scorekeepers make, and here there is nothing to configure.

What matters most at the table is being able to get it wrong. The undo button takes back the last score entered, so a hand credited to the wrong player is a second's work rather than half an hour of argument. The phone can go round the table freely: there is nothing personal on the screen, only the standings and the buttons for adding points.

Which games

The Italian classics are here — Scopa, Briscola, Burraco, Scala 40 and Machiavelli — alongside UNO and Flip 7, which are counted quite differently and each get a scorer of their own. Flip 7 in particular is not typed in at all: you tap the cards and the total works itself out, multiplier and bonus included. For everything else there is the free game, where you choose the target and whether the highest or lowest score wins. That covers board games, dice games, house variants and anything else normally counted by hand.

No account, nothing to install

There is no sign-up and nothing to download: Score Buddy opens in a browser and works straight away. Games are saved on the device you are using rather than on a server of ours, so they do not follow you from one phone to another — but nobody else can see them either. On a phone you can add it to the home screen and it opens like an ordinary app. Every game also has its own rules page, which is handy at the table when it turns out everyone remembers the rules slightly differently.