Pick'em, Survivor and Squares join Locker Room Fund

Locker Room Fund started with one game, Points Pool. It now has four. A team chooses its game when it sets up, and every game comes with its own setup, its own pages for parents and for the team's admins, its own payments and its own emails.

Here is how the three new ones play.

Pick'em

Pick the winner of every game on the week's schedule. The entry with the most right wins the week.

• A guess at the Monday night total breaks ties.
• A game that ends in a tie, or is canceled, counts for nobody.

It suits families who want a reason to care about every kickoff, not only their own team's.

Survivor

Pick one team to win each week. You can never pick the same team twice.

• A loss puts you out. So does a tie.
• Entries close at the first deadline. After that, the field only gets smaller.
• The last entry standing wins. If the final entries all go out in the same week, they split.

Survivor asks the least of a busy parent: one pick a week. It also gets tense fast, because by midseason the safe teams are used up.

Squares

One 10 by 10 grid for the whole season. A family buys squares once and plays every Monday night.

• Fresh digits are drawn once before each Monday night game.
• Each paying quarter is worth a fixed cash prize, and the score at the end of that quarter picks the winning square.
• Square sales close after the season's last draw.

Nobody has to know football to play, so it's the easy one to send to grandparents and out-of-town family.

One set of rules under all four

All four games stand on the same foundation: the schedule and the scores, how places and prize splits work, and which payments count for a given week. For a team, that means a rule that's true in one game is true in the next. A payment counts for a week the same way everywhere. A tie splits a prize the same way everywhere.

Points Pool moved onto that foundation without changing a single result. I put 200,000 made-up weeks through the old version and the new one, and every result matched.

A few rules hold across the games:

• A pool can't open once its first deadline has passed.
• Once a week is scored, its board shows only the entries that actually played that week.
• When a tiebreak decides a week, the board records which game the tiebreak used.

There's also a demo: a made-up team running one pool of each game on this season's real results. It never sends anything to anyone, so it's safe to poke at.