Bar & Yard Game Score Keeper

This round

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Rules

Why so many of these games cancel

Cornhole, ladder toss, washers and horseshoes all use cancellation scoring: both sides throw, the round totals cancel, and only the difference goes to whoever threw more. It keeps games close and it makes defence worth as much as offence — knocking your opponent's bag off the board is worth exactly as much as landing your own. Bocce and shuffleboard reach the same place by a different route: only the side with the best-placed piece scores at all. Either way, a huge round from one side is worth nothing if the other side matches it, which is the single most misunderstood thing about backyard scoring.

Cancellation keeps about a third, whatever the game

Only the higher-scoring side scores, and only by the difference. These 6 games were designed by different people in different centuries, with targets from 12 to 21 and rounds worth anywhere from 4 points to 16. The share of a round's gross that survives:

A band 5 points wide across games that look nothing alike, and it is not a coincidence in the designs. For two independent scores drawn evenly from nothing to n, the average gap works out to n(n+2) over 3(n+1) — a third of n, plus a small correction of one third of (n+1) for the coarseness of a short round.

So Bocce's 40% is that correction being large because a round is only worth four points, and shuffleboard's 35% is the same correction being small because a round is worth sixteen. The model is rough — real players are neither evenly spread nor independent — but the structural point survives any sensible distribution: cancellation throws away roughly two thirds of what gets scored.

Which makes every game about twice as long as it looks

Divide the target by the most one side can throw and you get the fastest possible game. Divide it by what actually survives and you get something rather longer.

Every one of them lands between two and three times its theoretical minimum. A cornhole game that could in principle be over in two frames typically takes five, and Horseshoes is the long afternoon at about 9. Anyone who has watched a game sit at 19–18 for twenty minutes has met the same arithmetic from the other end.

One small mercy: every game here has a one-point throw, so every whole total from nothing up to the maximum is reachable in a single round. That is what stops the 2 games needing an exact landing from ever leaving you stranded — from any score within a round of the target, the target can be hit.