What a skins carryover is

Skins is scored on net scores. Each hole is worth one skin, and it is awarded to the outright lowest net on that hole. "Outright" is the whole game: if two players tie for low, nobody wins the hole. That is what makes skins swingy in a way stroke play is not — a good hole is worth nothing at all if someone matches it.

With carryover on, a tied hole is not lost, it is deferred. Its stake carries forward and is added to the next hole that someone does win outright. Three consecutive ties followed by a win makes that fourth hole worth four skins, and a run of ties late in a round can make the last hole worth more than the rest of the round put together. Nothing is ever destroyed: the skins won plus the pot still carrying always account for every hole in the round.

Carryover on has one consequence worth knowing before the round rather than during it. Because each hole’s value depends on every hole before it, a hole missing a score from anybody playing the game freezes every hole after it — the chain past an unresolved hole genuinely is unknown, so those holes show as pending rather than guessing. Get the card complete and they resolve at once.

With carryover off, each hole is worth exactly one skin and is scored on its own. The outright low wins one; a tie is dead and nothing rolls forward. There is no pot to build, so a late run of holes is worth what it says it is worth.

Because the holes are independent, a missing score is pending in isolation and does not hold up any later hole. That, plus the flatter payout, is why new skins games in RyderDie start with carryover off — it is the version that behaves predictably when a card is half-entered on the turn.

A skins game also has a scope, and it decides how far a carry can travel. A field game runs one chain across everyone in the round: a tie anywhere carries into the next hole won by anyone. A pairing game splits into an independent skins game per tee-time group — each group has its own field and its own carry chain, and a tie in one group can never carry into another group’s hole.

The same four cards can therefore produce different answers under the two scopes, which is the point rather than a defect: a per-group game is several small games played at once, and its pot is funded by the players in that group.

Skins is a net game by default, but it can be scored gross instead — which is exactly a handicap allowance of zero, so nobody receives strokes and net equals gross. Whichever way a game is set, the setting freezes into the round when it is finalized, so the round keeps scoring the way it was played.