I grew up loving board games. Some of the best nights of my life happened around a table: a box open in the middle, the rules half remembered, everyone talking over everyone, and one more game that turned into three.
Years later, those nights sometimes started to blur together. I’d see a game on a shelf and know I had played it. I just couldn’t tell you exactly when. Or who was there. Or who won, which is always the part people argue about.
The camera roll problem
The answers were in my phone, somewhere. So I’d scroll. Past screenshots and receipts and a hundred photos of nothing, looking for the one picture of the table. Sometimes I found it. Usually I found half of it: the board, but not the scores. The people, but not the game.
The scores lived somewhere else entirely. A notes app. The back of an envelope. A score pad that went home in someone’s pocket. Whoever kept score kept the story, and by morning the story was gone.
On the rare occasion I remembered to stash old score sheets in the game box, I always loved reading through them later and reliving the memories of those nights in my mind.
I didn’t want a leaderboard. I wanted to be able to open a night again.
Looking for one place
What I wanted was one place that held the whole night. What we played. The scores, round by round if we kept them. The photos. Who was there, even the friend who only watched. And the little things that make a night worth remembering, like the year somebody finally beat the person who always wins.
I looked. There are good apps for logging plays and counting stats. There are photo albums. There are score pads. But nothing I tried put the scores, the photos, the story and the stats together, the way a game night actually happens. And most of them felt like spreadsheets or social feeds, when what I wanted felt more like a scrapbook.
So I built it
I built Tabletales for me and my friends first. It’s a scorepad and scrapbook for game night. You keep score while you play, by hand or as final totals, and the Scorepad does the adding. You snap a photo from the table. When the night ends, it’s saved: the games, the scores, who was there, and the pictures, all in one place you can open again next week or years from now.
Over time it turns into something I never had before. Every game gets a history: how often we play it, who we play it with, and who holds the high score. Every friend has the nights we’ve shared. The stats are there, quietly, for when someone asks who really wins the most.
And it stays ours. A night isn’t posted anywhere. It’s for the people who were at the table, and you decide who else can see it.
For the next game night
I still can’t tell you exactly when I first played some of the games on my shelf. But I’ll remember the next ones. If you’ve ever scrolled through your camera roll looking for a game night, I built this for you too.
I hope you give it a try.
Tyler
