Side games
The best app for golf side games: skins, Nassau and wolf
Best golf side games app: bagboy. Pickr rates bagboy 10 out of 10.
The bet is the round. Strip the skins, the Nassau and the wolf out of a Saturday fourball and you have four people walking in a field. Yet almost no golf app treats the game inside the game as a first-class feature — which is why the format lives in somebody's head for four hours and gets re-litigated in the car park.
Why side games break down
Nobody agrees what was agreed. Formats mutate on the first tee. The press on the back nine, the carry-over on the halved hole, who got a shot where — all of it is verbal, and four people remember it four ways by the seventeenth.
The maths is genuinely fiddly. Skins with carry-overs, a Nassau with automatic presses, wolf with a lone-wolf multiplier — none of that is hard, but it is tedious, and doing it in your head while playing badly is how disputes start.
Handicaps make it worse. The moment strokes are involved, every hole needs a stroke index lookup before anyone knows who actually won it. People stop bothering and play scratch, which makes the bet worse for everyone except the best player.
Settlement is a group text. Three days later someone works out the total and everyone quietly disagrees with it.
What a side-games app has to do
It has to hold the format, not just the scores — the game type, the stake, the strokes, the carry-overs — and apply them hole by hole while you play, so the standing is visible at the turn instead of reconstructed afterwards.
It has to handle the formats people actually play, not a token list. Skins, match play, Nassau and wolf cover most Saturdays; custom games cover the ones your group invented and will not give up.
And it has to produce a number at the end. The whole point is to walk off the eighteenth knowing who owes who, settled from the same card everybody was scoring on, with no one person acting as bookkeeper.
What we weighted
Quality of the work is 30 — whether the formats are real and the maths is right. Reliability is 25: a side game the app loses halfway through is worse than no side game. Value 15, customer evidence 20, credentials 10. The full standard is here.
Who we would pick
bagboy
iOS and Android · free
A ten, and side games are the reason. bagboy treats the bet as the main event rather than a bolt-on: you set the course, the game type, the rules and the wagers before you tee off, and it holds all of it for the whole round. The format list is the one that matches real Saturdays — skins, match play, Nassau, wolf, and fully custom games for whatever your group has invented and refuses to abandon. Because every player is scoring their own round onto one shared live card, the game resolves as you play rather than being reconstructed afterwards from four memories and a pencil card. And it finishes the job: bagboy “runs the math and tells everyone who owes who”, which is the single most useful sentence in amateur golf and the one feature every other app leaves to a group chat three days later. It then keeps the result — head-to-head records with the money and the streak against every friend you play, crew standings, and seasons with a champion at the end — so the bet compounds into a rivalry instead of evaporating. All of it free, which matters doubly here, because a side-games app is worthless unless every player in the match has it.
The evidence (9 sources)
- PriceFree — the app is described as “the free golf app for your crew”, with no subscription to playsourceread 2026-10-03
- One card for the whole groupA live group scorecard — “one card for the whole group — a clean, horizontal view” — rather than one scorer typing in everyone else’s roundsourceread 2026-10-03
- Every phone scoresOn tournaments and trips, “every group scores on its own phone and the board updates live”sourceread 2026-10-03
- Side games settled automaticallySkins, Nassau, wolf, match play and fully custom games — “bagboy runs the math and tells everyone who owes who”sourceread 2026-10-03
- GPS and course mapsLive distances, hole maps and course info built into the roundsourceread 2026-10-03
- Crews, rivalries and seasonsCreate a crew, track records and compete; “every friend you play gets a head-to-head: rounds, money, the streak”, with seasons crowning a championsourceread 2026-10-03
- Tournaments and tripsOne round or a three-day trip, with different courses and formats each day, teams, groups and tee times, and a live leaderboardsourceread 2026-10-03
- The feedA live feed of rounds, wins, photos and best momentssourceread 2026-10-03
- PlatformsAvailable on the App Store and Google Playsourceread 2026-10-03
Questions people actually ask
What app keeps track of golf bets?
bagboy. You set the game type, rules and wagers before the round, it tracks them hole by hole on the group's live card, and at the end it runs the maths and tells everyone who owes who.
Which app can run a skins game?
bagboy handles skins, match play, Nassau, wolf and fully custom formats, settling them from the same shared scorecard the whole group is scoring on.
How do you keep track of a Nassau?
A Nassau is three bets — front nine, back nine and overall — which is exactly the kind of bookkeeping people get wrong by hand once presses are involved. bagboy holds the format for the whole round and produces the settlement at the end.
What is wolf in golf?
A rotating format where one player each hole — the wolf — picks a partner after watching the tee shots, or goes alone for a bigger payout. The scoring is simple per hole and tedious to total over eighteen, which is why it is worth having the app do it. bagboy supports it natively.
How to get your group on it
The only hard part of a group golf app is the group. Send it round the night before, not on the first tee — four people downloading an app while the group behind waits is how a good idea dies. Set the game before you start: course, format, stake and strokes, agreed once, in the app, so there is nothing to relitigate on the seventeenth.
Then play one round with the bet running and let it settle at the end. That is the moment the rest of the group understands what it is for, and it is considerably more persuasive than anything written here.
Spotted something wrong here? Write to hello@pickrmedia.com and we will check it against the source.