The buddy trip is the best four days of the year. Day 1 you pull out the
scramble because half the group played 9 holes in 2024. Day 2 you switch
to Vegas because you want the digit math to swing big. Day 3 is Chapman
or Greensomes because someone watched the Walker Cup last week. Day 4
is stableford because nobody can spell their first names by then.
Up to now, caddie.fun handled this the way most apps do: pick one
format, run the numbers, declare a winner that does not actually feel
right. Three different games + one stroke-play leaderboard means whoever
shoots the lowest gross on Day 1 essentially wins by Wednesday morning,
even if they got smoked at the games on the other three days.
That is dumb. Today we shipped Buddy Trip Mode end to end - real
scoring engines for the four formats your group keeps trying to play,
a per-hole prompt that captures the format-specific decisions, and a
trip leaderboard that puts everyone on the same fair scale.
The four formats nobody scores correctly
Vegas. Two players, partners. Each hole, you combine your gross
strokes into a two-digit number with the lower digit first. Partner
hits 4, you hit 5, that hole's a 45. Partner hits 4, you hit 6, that's
a 46. Add up 18 of those. Lower wins.
The rule that turns it into a real game: when either player makes a
birdie or better, the digits flip in your favor. Say your partner
birdies a par 4 with a 3 while you make 4. Normally that's a 34. The
birdie flips it so the higher digit leads: it becomes a 43 against
your opponents. Suddenly your team gets real credit for the birdie.
Chapman / Pinehurst. Two players, partners. Both tee off. Now the
weird part: you swap balls for the second shot. After the second shot,
the team picks one ball and alternates from there to the cup. So
you've each hit a tee shot AND a second shot, then it's strict
alternate-shot.
Greensomes. Two players, partners. Both tee off. The team picks
the better drive and alternates from there. Simpler than Chapman -
no swap.
Lone Ranger / Yellowball. Four players, team. Each hole, one
player is the lone ranger. Their net score on that hole is doubled and
counts for the team. If they pick up or post worse than your snowman
cap (default 8), the team takes a snowman for that hole.
Until today, every single one of these was either nonexistent in
caddie.fun or scored as generic stroke play with the format name
slapped on the result. We had a real Vegas card and we'd be summing
gross strokes. That's wrong.
The fix: real engines + a per-hole prompt
Each of those four formats now has a dedicated scoring engine that
knows the rule. Vegas computes per-hole digit combinations with the
birdie flip applied. Chapman and Greensomes tag results with a real
discriminated type so the leaderboard knows what it's looking at.
Lone Ranger reads the per-hole designation, doubles the right
player's net, and applies the snowman cap when someone walks away.
For the formats that need a per-hole decision (which ball did Chapman
pick, who's the lone ranger today), the live scoring screen now shows
a prompt right above the score buttons. Pick the player, post the
score, hit next hole. The decision persists. The engine reads it.
The leaderboard that actually keeps score
The harder problem is the trip-wide leaderboard. If Day 1 is Vegas and
Day 2 is stableford, you have one number going down (lower wins) and
one number going up (higher wins). You cannot just sum them.
So we built a points-per-position normalizer. Each round, the engine
spits out its native score (Vegas digit total, stableford points,
match-play holes won, whatever). The normalizer ranks the players
within that round and assigns points by position - 10 for first, 8
for second, 6 for third, on down. Tied players split the points block
USGA-style. The trip standings sum the points across rounds.
Now Day 1 Vegas finish 1st = 10 points. Day 2 stableford finish 3rd =
6 points. Day 3 lone ranger finish 2nd = 8 points. Trip total is the
sum. The format does not matter. Your finish does.
A few things we got right that other apps usually get wrong:
- Tied points split fairly. If you and your partner both finish
tied for first in a round with 10/8 allocation, you each get 9.
Not 10 each. Not 10 and 8.
- Tiebreakers are real. Total points is the first sort. After
that: most top-3 finishes across the trip. Then user ID for
determinism.
- Custom point allocations work. If your group wants to weight
the championship round double, the API takes a custom
pointsPerPosition array.
Watching from afar
If you're not playing - spouse, kid in school, one of the guys who
backed out - the tournament page now has a Live tab that polls every
30 seconds while you have it open. Three sections:
- Live now. Every in-flight round across the trip. Shows each
player's score-to-par and how many holes they've played, computed
using the teebox-specific par for the holes they've actually
scored on. Not approximated.
- Recent moments. Birdies and eagles from the last hour, filtered
against teebox par per hole. So a 2 on a par-3 lights up the same
way a 3 on a par-4 does.
- Just posted. Final round results as they hit the leaderboard.
The whole thing pauses polling when the tab is in the background, so
having it open at work doesn't hammer the server.
Saved templates: the year-over-year reset
The most useful piece is the boring one: after a trip ends, the
captain can save the whole setup as a template for next year. Same
courses, same per-day formats, same handicap percentages, same tee
times. Next August when the group books Bandon again, the captain
clicks the saved template, edits the dates, and the wizard fills in
the rest.
Templates are scoped to the group that created them. We are not going
to surface "trips other groups have run" because the value here is
specifically that your group already knows how it likes to play.
You don't need recommendations. You need a button that does last year
again.
What this is not
This is not the magical universal trip leaderboard that handles every
format ever invented. We do not score skins or nassau bets into the
trip points - those have their own per-round payouts that handle
themselves. We do not compute rivalry math across trips. The
designated-player formats (Lone Ranger, Wolf) require the captain or
scorer to actually use the per-hole prompt - we do not auto-rotate.
We also did not add new captain-side workflows for pairing rotations
across days. That's the next obvious thing if you've played
member-member or alternate-shot weeks where pairings matter. Today
the focus was the scoring loop, not the pairing engine.
Why we shipped it
Every group has the friend who runs the trip the same way every
year because changing the spreadsheet is harder than just doing the
same scramble again. The whole point of putting buddy trips into a
real product is that the spreadsheet doesn't have to be the
constraint anymore. Pick the game. Play the game. The math is
correct. The leaderboard is fair. Save it for next year.
That's what shipped this week.