How to keep score of your board game plays: notebook, spreadsheet or app?

The game is over, points are counted, someone asks “are you writing that down?”. Then the box closes and the score is gone. Three months later nobody knows who wins Ticket to Ride most often. Logging plays is not an accountant's obsession: it is what makes rankings, records and knowing which games really get played possible.

There are four main ways to do it. None of them is right for everyone.

1. The notebook (or the game's score pad)

What it does well: nothing to install, no battery, and real charm. Many games come with a score pad, and a dedicated notebook quickly becomes a keepsake, crossed-out numbers and comments included.

Where it falls short: it calculates nothing. To find out who won the most games this year, you recount everything by hand. Loose sheets get lost, and the notebook stays at home when you play at a friend's.

Best for: people who want a record, not statistics.

2. The spreadsheet

What it does well: anything is possible. One row per play (date, game, players, scores, winner), then pivot tables for win rates, most-played games, average margins.

Where it falls short: data entry. Filling in a spreadsheet on a phone at the end of the night, with six scores to type, is exactly when people give up. Most play-tracking spreadsheets stop after a few weeks.

Best for: stats lovers willing to enter their plays later, in peace.

3. Dedicated apps

Several apps are built for logging plays. BG Stats is very thorough and aimed at people who love detailed statistics. MYLUDO, best known in France for collection management, also lets you log plays. Others, like MeepleThèque, focus on fast entry at the table.

What they do well: they are already in your pocket, remember your usual players and calculate everything: winners, rankings, games that get played, games that do not.

Where some fall short: a few ask for many fields for a simple play. If logging a game takes more than a minute, you will not do it every time.

Best for: anyone who wants stats without re-typing, provided the app is quick.

The criterion that really matters: logging time

It is easy to overlook, but the quality of your history depends less on the tool than on consistency. And consistency depends on one thing: how long it takes to record a play. A good test: at the end of a game, time the gap between “right, let me log it” and “done”. Over a minute, and on tired evenings you will skip it.

A few questions to help you choose:

• Do your games have scores, or just a winner? If most plays boil down to “who won”, you need a tool where that takes a single tap.
• Do you play cooperative games? Then the tool must be able to record “the team won” or “the game won” without naming a winner.
• Do your games have negative scores? Some tools do not accept them, which gets annoying fast.
• Do you sometimes play without signal? A basement, a country house, a train: the tool should still save.

What the data teaches you

After a few dozen logged plays, surprises start to appear:

• the game you thought was “your favourite” came out twice this year;
• one person in the group wins 60% of their games at one specific title;
• your game nights are mostly three-player, which should shape your next purchases.

It is also the best way to spot the games gathering dust on your shelf.

How we approached it with MeepleThèque

We designed MeepleThèque around logging time. A play takes three taps: the game, the players, the winner. Scores are one extra tap away, with a minus sign for negative scores. Cooperative games are logged as a team, and everything works offline. Rankings, the podium of most-played games and the games that never come out are all calculated for you.