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Guides
The formulas, the spreadsheets and the workarounds we used before we built our own system. Written out in full, with free templates and no email form, including the parts where they stop working.
Why these exist
Everything below is what we actually used before we built our own system. The real formulas, the real files, and the parts that went wrong. There is no email form on any of it and nothing is held back to force a demo request.
That is deliberate. A guide that hedges is not useful, and an operator running four events a year does not need to buy anything from us. Take the template. Come back when the volume does.
The honest half is at the bottom of each one. Every guide ends with where that method stops working, because that is the part that decides whether you are still trusting it at your fortieth event.
Where to start
The cluster
The four formulas that do the work, why RANK hands you 1, 2, 2, 4 and what to do about it, and how to get a timed race, a tug of war and a puzzle challenge into the same table. Ends with the six things that go wrong anyway, including the day the wrong team came first.
If you are choosing between the two for an event, choose Sheets, and we explain why rather than just saying it. Includes the Google Forms trick that gets facilitators entering scores from their own phones, which is the single biggest source of error removed for nothing.
It cannot update live, and we say that in the first line rather than the last. What it can do is three things, and the third one, a built reveal between rounds, is better theatre than a live board for most events and costs nothing.
RAND redraws every time the file recalculates, which means the winner you just read out can quietly become somebody else. The mechanism, the one rule that saves you, how to stop the same person winning twice, and how to draw fifty at once.
Six games, four ways of scoring, one table that a room will accept. Includes the penalty rule that gets applied in the wrong place more often than any other: on a timed game the penalty goes on the time, before ranking, not on the points afterwards. The two give different winners.
The free templates
Both are the real files, not screenshots of files. Every formula in the guides is in them, they have been recalculated and the outputs checked by hand, and there is a read-me sheet in each one.
Free, and you are welcome to rebrand them and use them commercially. No sign-up, no licence to read. If you pass one on or write about it, a mention of GamesTally is appreciated. It is a thank you, not a condition.
Downloads
The obvious question
Because we are not selling the arithmetic. A spreadsheet can do the maths perfectly well, and pretending otherwise would be the fastest way to lose an operator who has been running events longer than we have.
Points, conversions, totals, positions. All of it, correctly, for as long as one person has the file open and the time to keep it right.
Update live on a client screen. Take entry from the person who saw the result. Survive a game being cut at 11am. Tell you who changed a number.
Somewhere around twenty events a year, a second person checking the sheet stops being caution and starts being headcount. That is the whole argument.
If you are nowhere near that, the templates above are genuinely enough and we would rather you used them. If you are past it, GamesTally Score is USD 4,000, paid once.
Start here
Bring us your event. Your spreadsheet. Your score sheet. Your PowerPoint. Or just tell us what's driving you mad, we'll show you what GamesTally could turn it into.
Yes, you can bring your Excel sheet.