Why Blitzer

Keeping score for Dutch Blitz is genuinely simple. A sheet of paper and a pen is more than enough, and replacing them is harder than it looks. Paper never loses your data, never needs a signal, and never makes you wait.

But paper only holds one night. The patterns you start to notice after playing a lot of Dutch Blitz are the interesting part, and there are more of them the longer you play. You feel them while you're playing. You just can't do anything with them at the time.

That's because Dutch Blitz forces you to be in the moment. You can't play well and be thinking about anything else. It's one of the best things about the game, and it's why the reflection has to happen afterwards.

The questions

How did that game actually go? How have you changed as a player? Who really has the better record against whom? What's the longest game you've ever been part of?

None of that is answerable unless somebody wrote the rounds down in a form that still means something six months later. Capturing the data is the job Blitzer took first. What it can answer today is a shorter list than the one above, and it's written out in Reading your stats.

The bar

Score entry has to be faster than a pen, mistakes have to be fixable, and a score must never be lost for a technical reason. If it isn't lower friction than the thing it replaces, nobody uses it long enough to accumulate the history that made it worth building.

That's why so much of the work has gone into the scoring screen rather than the charts. The charts are the reward; the scoring screen is the rent.

Where it is now

Today Blitzer scores a game round by round, shows live standings and real win odds while you play, keeps your group's games together in a Circle, and builds up your own stats over time. There's a lot more this data could answer than it does today. That's the fun part still ahead.