Keep score, see progress, play together

What it does while you play

Keeping score by hand is more annoying than it sounds, and always for the same three reasons: the two scoring modes, the exact-fifty rule, and the three misses nobody tracks past the second round.

The app does all three while you play. Tap the pins that fell; it scores the throw correctly, updates the running total, applies the overshoot penalty and counts the misses.

The screenshot above shows the trap live: two pins knocked over, the 5 and the 10, and the button offers +2. Not fifteen. It is the rule everyone gets wrong in their first game, and the one you cannot get wrong here.

Your statistics

One game of Mölkky is forgotten by the evening. Thirty games say something: whether you are aiming better, winning more, playing often.

The app keeps count of games, wins, win rate, points per throw and your biggest throw. Below that, an activity calendar shows the days you played, and two charts show the direction of travel: a rolling average over five games, and win rate counted from the first.

The average is rolling precisely so that one lucky twelve does not look like progress. A statistic that flatters teaches you nothing.

Playing with friends

This is the part that makes a second game more likely than a first.

Add someone by name or username, then put them in a game. The result shows up for both of you: who won, when, against whom. After a few weeks that list is your group's history, not just yours.

Clubs go a step further: a place for the regular crowd, its members and its games. You invite by email, and the link signs them up and adds them to the club in one go.

With or without an account

Both are free. The account buys nothing — it makes possible the things that need a server to exist at all.

Nothing in the left-hand column is crippled. A guest game is a complete game, and it will stay one.

Works with the radio off

This is the part that took the most work and is the easiest to overlook.

Mölkky is played on lawns, in parks, on campsites and at the far end of gardens — which is to say, in exactly the places where mobile data is worst. A scorekeeper that spins a loading indicator halfway through a game is worse than a piece of paper.

So the scoring path never touches the network. The app installs to the home screen, opens without a connection, and a full game — adding players, scoring every throw, undoing a mistake, finishing and seeing the standings — runs entirely on the device. If you are signed in, games sync when a connection comes back; if you are not, they stay on the phone.

The rules it knows

• Both scoring modes — one pin scores its number, several score the count.
• Exactly fifty to win, with the drop back to twenty-five on an overshoot.
• The twenty-five-point short game, with the penalty scaled to fifteen.
• Three scoreless throws and out, or the friendlier reset-to-zero variant.
• Teams, sharing one score and one miss count.
• Undo, because someone always taps the wrong pin.

The rules of Mölkky is the full ruleset the app implements, if you want to check it against your own.

Languages

The app is in English, Dutch, French and German — the same four as this site. French players get 12quilles, which is what the game's twelve pins are called in French.

Pages about the app