App Review: Tallier 4

There's something to be said for playing a real physical board game. The feel of the dice, the satisfaction of moving your pieces, being able to ponder the board in front of you and how best to proceed. But there's something that's not so satisfying: keeping score on a sheet of paper. But, as they say, there's an app for that: Tallier. Made by Ewac Software, Tallier is a basic score tracker at its core, but it offers much more beyond a simple tally.

Tallier can be used for that basic score tracking, but it can also help you with more tracking than that. It can be set up to allow a certain number of rounds, negative scores, and threshold goals (i.e. hitting 21 is winning). You can also set up other tracking, like which player dealt the cards that round.

Despite all the customization, our favorite part of Tallier is how the app looks. It takes the expected path of a yellow notepad, but uses a legible handwritten font that's just plain fun. It helps make the app more enjoyable to use, but also disguises the technical aspects behind what is in the back-end a customized spreadsheet. The smiling and frowning icons also help to add a bit of silliness to the process.

Tallier is really quite simple and straightforward. That it's all automatically added up for you, right in front of you, makes it easier to stop worrying about mistakes in the totalling arithmetic - intentional or otherwise. Thanks to the customizable rules, Tallier is perfect for card games, board games, and even tracking physical sports.

There is something about Tallier that somewhat bothers us: you can't save your scores for posterity or long-running competitions. That makes us sad. But then we see that goofy big-grinned winner smiley and fun hand-written text makes us happy again. Tallier is $1.00 in the webOS App Catalog.