DOTS Golf Game Rules

Dots is the game that pays you for good golf, one shot at a time. Hit a fairway, stick a green, get up and down, drain a long one, make a birdie — every good thing you do earns a dot, and at the end the dots turn into cash.

The setup

1. Agree on a value per dot before you tee off — a quarter a dot is a popular starting point.
2. Everybody plays their own ball and chases their own dots. There's no rotation and no one player in the hot seat — it's you against the whole table on total dots.
3. As you play, you (or the app) mark each achievement a player earns on every hole. Dots stack — a great hole can bank several at once.

What earns a dot

These are the exact achievements SideAction Saloon tracks, and the dots each one is worth:

How it plays

1. Play the hole as normal, then tally what each player earned. Multiple dots per hole are the whole point — fairway, green, one-putt and birdie can all land on the same hole.
2. Some achievements are mutually exclusive by definition: a green in regulation can't also be an up-and-down or bunker save, because those require missing the green. A hole-in-one supersedes the par/birdie/eagle dot for that hole.
3. Scoring feats are auto-detected from your score and putts (par, birdie, eagle, ace, green in regulation, one-putt). The shot-quality ones — fairways, sand saves, up-and-downs — get tapped in.
4. Dots accumulate hole by hole into a running total for each player all the way to 18.

How dots settle / payouts

At the end of the round, each player's dot total is compared against every other player, head to head. For each opponent, take the difference in dots and multiply by the agreed value per dot. Add those up and that's your result for the round. Pile up the most dots and you collect from everyone below you.

A worked example

Four players, 25¢ a dot. Final dot totals: Amy 32, Ben 25, Cole 20, Dee 18.

• Amy tops the field. She's +7 on Ben, +12 on Cole, +14 on Dee = 33 dots ahead total × 25¢ = +$8.25.
• Ben is −7 to Amy, +5 on Cole, +7 on Dee = +5 net × 25¢ = +$1.25.
• Cole is −12, −5, +2 = −15 net × 25¢ = −$3.75.
• Dee is −14, −7, −2 = −23 net × 25¢ = −$5.75.

Notice it all balances to zero across the group. Birdies (2 dots), eagles (3) and aces (4) swing these totals fast — one hot stretch of greens and one-putts can flip the whole leaderboard.

Strategy

Dots rewards complete golf, not just a low number. A par where you missed every fairway earns one dot; a par where you split the fairway, hit the green and two-putted can earn three. So play for the dots: take the safe line that banks a fairway, then a green, then leave yourself the one-putt look. And because birdies, eagles and the ace are worth multiples, the aggressive line on a reachable par 5 can pay double or triple — go get them when the math is in your favor.

Who it's for

Dots is perfect for groups of mixed ability who want everyone in the game on every hole — there's always a dot to chase even when the scorecard's gone sideways. It runs cleanly for any size group and pairs naturally with Skins, Wolf or Banker going at the same time.

Keeping the books straight

Dots is a lot to track by hand: ten kinds of achievement, some worth more than others, some that cancel each other out, every player, every hole, then a head-to-head settlement across the whole group. Miss one greenie and the math is off. SideAction Saloon tracks every dot — auto-detecting the scoring ones, enforcing the exclusions, and tallying every player — then settles the entire round automatically with one screen showing who owes who.