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.
Thanks for the feedback, the current iteration is definitely a work in progress and mobile needs much polish. Your bottom tab idea is a good one for mobile.
I'm not a regular Scrabble player so feedback from actual players is helpful. I've seen the play column and thought it was a neat-to-have feature, but on mobile it's a different story.
I'm not sure Catan makes sense for this. Keeping tabs on the other player's score is part of the game. If a player has a development card face down, you never really know their actual score for sure, and you have to consider the unknown into your strategy.
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.
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.
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.
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 mean it's no surprise with it being one of the most popular board games right now. I finally got around to purchasing it about a month ago and I really like it as well. Has the perfect balance between simplicity and strategy.
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
- 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.