Tableside Is Built for Card Night, Not a Balance Sheet

Card night doesn't need an app that tracks money. It needs an app that can count. Tableside is built on that distinction on purpose: every value in it is just "points" — what those points mean, beads or bragging rights or backyard leaves, is entirely up to the table. That one decision keeps the app out of currency-tracking territory and lets it stay focused on the thing that actually ruins game night: someone losing track of the running score three rounds in.

Two modes, because two kinds of games exist

STACK mode is a running buy-in ledger — track each player's stack, handle rebuys, and at the end compute the fewest possible transfers to settle everyone up. SCORE mode is round-by-round scoring with running totals, high or low score winning depending on the game. Poker wants the first. Spades wants the second. An app that only did one of them would be solving half the actual problem, so Tableside does both, cleanly, without forcing one game's rules onto another.

Built to survive real friction, not just the demo

The features that matter most in an app like this are the small, unglamorous ones: tap a player's row to edit or delete a single wrong entry instead of restarting the round. A Contacts picker for building the player list fast, with permission requested only when you actually tap it — never on launch — and a graceful fallback if you just want to type names by hand. A delete confirmation so an accidental swipe doesn't erase a real game. None of those are headline features. All of them are the difference between an app people actually reach for mid-game and one that gets abandoned the first time it loses a round's data.

The feature that prevents data loss is worth more than the feature that looks good in a screenshot.

What just shipped

Tableside now has head-to-head records and win streaks layered onto its existing career stats, a full tournament/bracket mode for game nights with more than two competing teams, and a real Apple Watch companion that mirrors a live points-mode game to your wrist — built on genuine bidirectional sync, not a static readout. All of it free, on-device, no account, exactly like everything else in this portfolio.