I love having people over to play pinball, but I always feel like pinball would be more addictive with a way to track one's own personal bests. the games themselves of course have various leaderboards, but unless i reset them all the time, visitors are unlikely to make any of the high scores, and even then, those high score lists aren't particularly visible or persistent.
So, I spent an evening a few weeks back putting together a high score app for my gameroom, so that anyone who visits can record any score they're proud of, and maybe try to beat it next time they come over.
You just tap a game and it prompts you to enter your initials and your score. To update a score, you just tap on that score and enter a new score. It keeps one score per person and automatically sorts them highest to lowest. I admit it doesn't do much that a whiteboard and a dry erase marker couldn't do, but I think it looks cool and I had fun making it.
I really like how the font styling came out on each of them.
Last night I got to try it out on guests for the first time. I didn't know if they'd be interested in using it, but after just a little bit of encouragement, they really took to it and started recording all their scores and checking the app trying to beat each others' personal bests. They stuck around competing to record better and better scores until after 2am! Even my daughter played more pinball than I've ever seen her play before, excited to track and improve her scores.
It also prompted a lot more questions than usual about strategies and rules and so forth.
Overall, I'm pretty psyched about how successful this was at getting people to do more than play a couple balls and then wander away. I think something like this would be a great addition to any game room.
I'm currently running it on a 12" Surface Pro touchscreen on a stand on a table, but I'm considering putting it on a larger touchscreen monitor mounted on a wall.