Core Concepts

Before diving into features, here’s a quick overview of the key concepts you’ll encounter in Keeping Score!

Participants

Every game needs at least two participants — the umbrella term for players and teams:

• Players — Individual competitors. Type a name or pick from saved personas.
• Teams — Groups of players scoring together. A team can track a single Team Total score, or sum up Individual member scores.

Participants can be reordered via drag-and-drop, shuffled randomly from the game menu, eliminated mid-game (excluded from rankings), and marked as the current dealer for turn tracking.

Scoring Modes

How winners are determined. Choose one when creating a game:

Mode	How It Works	Example Games
Highest Wins	Highest score wins (default)	Scrabble, Trivia
Lowest Wins	Lowest score wins	Golf, Hearts
Win/Draw/Loss	Outcome-based — each round records W/D/L with League (3/1/0) or Classic (1/0.5/0) preset, or a custom split	Tournament brackets, Kids games

Point Exchange is an additional modifier (compatible with Highest/Lowest Wins) for zero-sum games like Mahjong, where one participant’s gain is deducted from another’s.

Scoring also supports a count direction — Count Up (default) or Count Down (e.g., Darts 501) — and a configurable starting score.

Learn more in Scoring Modes.

Rounds

Games can optionally be round-based, with either a fixed round count or open-ended rounds. Each round captures a snapshot of every participant’s score, and a round grid leaderboard tracks cumulative totals across rounds.

Commit a round via Next Round, or roll back with Reopen Previous Round before any scores are entered in the new round.

Learn more in Rounds.

End Conditions

Choose when a game ends:

Condition	What Happens
Open Ended	Finish manually whenever you’re done
Target Score	Ends when any participant reaches the target
Total Scored	Ends when combined scores hit the target
Timed Game	Countdown timer — ends when time runs out
Timed Round	Per-round timer — resets at each round boundary
Target Score Per Round	Round ends when the target is reached
Total Scored Per Round	Round ends when the combined total is reached

Learn more in End Conditions.

Categories

Games can define up to 20 scoring categories (e.g., “Resources”, “Military”, “Science”) that each participant scores in independently. Category totals sync to the participant’s overall score. Category Templates let you save and reuse category sets. Not compatible with Win/Draw/Loss or Point Exchange.

Score History & Undo

Every score change is recorded as a ScoreChange — quick adjust, calculator, W/D/L, point exchange, or Siri — and grouped so multi-participant actions undo atomically. Review the full history and step back through changes from the game menu.

Personas

Reusable participant profiles that persist across games:

• Emoji or photo avatar (256×256 JPEG, mutually exclusive with emoji)
• 9 preset colours and 4 background patterns (stripes, stars, checkers, hearts)
• Game statistics: games played, wins, average position, hot/cold streaks
• Grouped into named collections for batch selection
• Synced across devices via iCloud

Learn more in Personas.

Game States

A game is either Playing or Finished:

• Playing — Scores can be updated, rounds committed
• Finished — Winner crowned with confetti, final ranks stored
• Reopen — Resume a finished game (restores the last committed round)
• Rematch — Start a fresh game pre-populated with the same setup and participants

Deletes are soft — items sit in Recently Deleted for 30 days before purge.

Game Collections

Group multiple games into a session (e.g., a Thursday poker night) with cross-game win tallies to determine an overall champion. Learn more in Game Collections.

Next Steps

• Navigating the App — Find your way around
• Family Game Night — A complete walkthrough