The patterns of scoring and interaction that you start to notice when you play a lot of Dutch Blitz are very interesting, and the more you play, the more intriguing they are.

Keeping scores for a game of Dutch Blitz can be really simple - just a sheet of paper and a pen is more than enough.

But, that doesn’t capture the full story.

It doesn’t let you see and explore the patterns that exist. You feel them when you’re playing. But your brain is so busy. Dutch Blitz is the kind of game that forces you to be in the moment. You can’t play (well) and also be distracted thinking about something else. That’s one of the things I love about it.

But, wouldn’t it be great to be able to reflect on how that game went? Or how you’ve been playing lately? Or how you’ve changed as a player over time? What’s your win average? Per round? Per game? Against a specific player? What’s the most rounds a game you’ve been part of has gone? How about ever?

How do you stack up against the best Dutch Blitz players in the world?

There are so many interesting questions that could be answered, or patterns visualized. If only. If only we had the data.

That’s where Blitzer comes in. Blitzer is a companion for serious Dutch Blitz players.

Create an account, score games and every result - every hand, every game will be stored and associated with you. Connect with other users - approve friendships so that you can add each other to new games. Watch your stats emerge on the Dashboard. Compare your batting average with your friends, and against all other players.

Ironically, Dutch Blitz was (apparently) created in part to help teach the creator’s kids math. You can see it in the way scores work in DB. But Blitzer has to be super easy to score with. There must be less friction than a piece of paper, which is actually a pretty high bar.

Making score entry easy, including fixing mistakes and making sure that a score is never lost for technical reasons are really important goals for this app. It has to be as low friction as possible in order for users to really feel like it’s worth using. If we hit that bar then it means that users will get a chance to experience the pleasure of nerding out so hard about their stats.

Other features might include:

• Sharing insane game results with friends, can choose to make then public.
• Showcasing “outlier” games - the hightest single score, the highest scoring game, the highest total score of all players,
• Leaderboards for who has the best hand win average, or who has the most game wins.
• Reverse leaderboards for the worst score (hah)
• Users can select their preferred deck icon (plow, pump, bucket or carriage) and also select who is playing which card icon in a game. This would enable even more esoteric comparisons - “does the deck you play with have any correlation with your win rate?” (”Do I play worse when I’m using my non-preferred deck?”)
• AI chat interface to just ask questions of the data set.
• Compare your performance against friends.

Crazy ideas