Virtual Scoreboard

Well, I've finally done it. I've moved into the 21st century for keeping score in my games. I gave up the scoreboard and pegs from the game board (which I had cut off from the board, since I've never used the board for solitaire play) for an app on my Android phone. The app is called Virtual Scoreboard and is available from the Google Play Store.

After installing the app and firing it up for the first time, you will go down the list of sports that you can choose a scoreboard for and, obviously, select Basketball. On the next screen, select the "NBA - 12" option. Fortunately, you'll only have to peruse the list once, as the app will put always put your last choice at the top of the list. The app does contain ads, but they're not too annoying. The worst is having to wait 5 seconds to skip an add, and most times you just get an add you can bypass right away by clicking on the X icon or a "continue to the app" link.

The scoreboard screen looks like this:

Then, I hit the 'EDIT' button and replace "Team 1" and "Team 2" with the three letter abbreviations for the two teams that I'm playing with, though you could also punch in the team names if you prefer. After hitting the 'DONE' button, you're taken back to the scoreboard screen. Now you're ready to go. The only thing that I use are the +1, +2, and +3 buttons to keep the running score for each team each time a basket or free throw is made.

The three things that I really like about keeping score on my phone with this app is that one, it's a smaller footprint than the scoreboard from the game board, two, it's a little quicker to press the + button to advance the score than to move the pegs, and three, it eliminates those times when a stray die would escape from my dice tray and wipe out the pegs on the cardboard scoreboard, causing me to have to spend a minute having to add up the scores manually from the scoresheet to reset the score (since I can never remember what the score was before the die wiped it out). 😖

If you keep score with a different Android app, or with an iOS app, let us know in the comments section, along with your perceived pros and cons of the app you're using.