About
Croquet Deadness — and its predecessor, Croquet DeadWatch — started with an offhanded challenge in October 1998.
The backstory begins earlier. I went to a small college that played a long-running annual croquet match against the US Naval Academy across the street. A lot of us spent afternoons on the front lawn playing croquet.
In several forms of croquet, including the one we played against Navy, it matters which ball has hit which other balls — the state called deadness. The traditional way to track it is a deadness board: a wooden or plastic panel with twelve sliding shutters. They work, but they’re one more thing to drag out for a casual match, alongside the wickets, stakes, balls, and mallets.
Around 1998, a company sold velcro-wristband deadness boards with small colored velcro circles. (I can’t find pictures of them online anymore.) Visiting a schoolmate after graduation, he suggested I write something similar for the Palm Pilot. I wasn’t a programmer at the time, but I filed it away.
Around 2016 I picked up iPhone development to see what it took. I remembered the conversation and wrote a deadness board as a proof of concept. It worked, but I never finished it. The Apple Watch was the missing piece — a wrist-worn deadness board fit the form factor — and the rebuilt version shipped as Croquet DeadWatch.
Croquet Deadness is the 2026 rewrite: a complete rebuild in SwiftUI, with a fresh visual design and two-way sync between iPhone and Apple Watch.