Everything you need to know about playing Golf Buddies — games, scoring, live rounds, your bag, and your data.
Golf Buddies turns any round into a game. It's a web app with 25 golf course games, a full team scorecard with a live leaderboard, gross & net handicap scoring, real-time shared games for your group, and a My Bag club organizer. It works in any modern browser and installs to your phone like an app.
There's a Free plan forever (three games — Scramble, Best Ball, and Bingo Bango Bongo — plus the full scorecard) and a Pro plan that unlocks all 25 games and removes ads for $4.99/month or $39.99/year. See the pricing page.
No. You can play as a guest and everything saves locally on your device. Create an account (email + password) when you want your rounds saved to the cloud and synced across devices, and to email results.
Open the app in your phone's browser and choose Add to Home Screen (the share menu on iOS; the browser menu on Android). It then launches full-screen and works offline.
Yes. Golf Buddies is a Progressive Web App with an offline app shell, so the scorecard keeps working in course dead zones. Cloud sync resumes when you're back online; guests always work locally.
25 formats across Team, Points, Betting, Contest, and Challenge styles — including Scramble, Best Ball, Wolf, Skins, Nassau, Match Play, Bingo Bango Bongo, and more. Every game card has how-to-play steps and a Play this game button that opens a pre-set scorecard.
Free includes Scramble, Best Ball, and Bingo Bango Bongo. The other 22 unlock with Pro. You can always read the rules for every game on Free; starting a locked game opens the plan screen.
Individual (stroke play), Team · Best ball, Team · Total, and Team · Hi-Low (points) — with a per-group toggle for how tied holes score in Hi-Low (½ each or 0 points).
Enter a handicap for each player on the setup card, then use the Gross / Net (HCP) toggle in the Standings (shown for individual stroke play when at least one handicap is set). Net = gross minus each player's allowance for the round (full for 18 holes, halved for 9; "plus" handicaps add strokes). The leaderboard re-ranks by net and shows gross beneath each net score, and your choice syncs in live games.
Start a live game and share the 6-character code or invite link. Everyone on the code shares one scorecard that syncs in real time, so the whole group sees the same scores as they're entered. Guests can join without an account.
Edit the Par row directly (a course-lookup search can auto-fill pars when configured). Clear scores starts a fresh round while keeping the same players, teams, and pars; Reset all starts a brand-new card.
Yes — signed-in players can email a formatted standings summary to any recipients.
A place to track your clubs. Reorder them by drag-and-drop or up/down controls, switch a club's type, and retire/return/remove clubs — with a multi-select mode for bulk changes and a collapsible retired-clubs area.
Data is encrypted in transit (HTTPS/HSTS) and at rest, access is enforced server-side with database Row-Level Security, and privileged keys never reach the browser. More on the Security & Trust page.
For accounts: your email, a display name, and a securely hashed password — plus the round and club data you enter. See the privacy policy.
In the app: Account menu → Delete account. You can also email info@cooppetition.com.
Golf Buddies is a golf app and does not handle health information, so HIPAA does not apply — please don't enter health data. We are working toward SOC 2 and ISO 27001 but are not yet certified, and we won't claim otherwise until an independent audit is complete. See the Security & Trust page.
Free is ad-supported; Pro is ad-free. Ads never appear in the live scoring flow.
Make sure you're signed in on both devices (guest data stays local to one device). Check your connection — sync resumes automatically when you're back online.
Confirm everyone joined the same code and each person has a working connection. The host anchors the card and catches up late joiners.
Golf Buddies caches an offline shell. Close and reopen the app, or pull to refresh; the service worker updates the cache automatically on the next load.
For general bugs, email info@cooppetition.com. For security vulnerabilities, please report privately — see the Security page or /.well-known/security.txt.