· 6 min read · inside golfy, rarity
What Makes a Golf Course “Rare”? Inside Golfy's Rarity & XP System
How Golfy scores 12,000+ US golf courses from Common to Legendary, why scarcity matters more than price, and exactly how much XP each tier is worth.
Every course in Golfy carries a rarity score from 0 to 100. It's the number that decides how much XP a check-in is worth, which badges you're chasing, and why Pebble Beach shows up gold in your collection while your Tuesday muni shows up grey. People ask how it's calculated, and whether it's just "expensive equals rare." It isn't. Here's the actual model.
The three inputs
Each course starts at a base of 30 points and moves up or down on three signals:
- Scarcity (0 to +22). How many other courses sit within 25 miles. This is the only signal we have for 100% of courses, so it does the heavy lifting. The median US course has about 20 neighbours; a course with fewer than ten is genuinely hard to substitute, and scores accordingly.
- Exclusivity (−4 to +14). Public courses score lowest, semi-private and resort courses sit in the middle, private clubs highest. Not because private is better — because it's harder to collect.
- Difficulty (−8 to +12). Slope rating where we have it, difficulty tier where we don't. A 150-slope monster earns more than an executive nine.
Add them up, clamp to 0–100, and you have the score for roughly 12,700 courses. That gets you the bottom three tiers.
Why Epic and Legendary are curated by hand
Early versions of the model had a problem: an isolated, unknown course in rural Montana with no neighbours and no data would outscore Pebble Beach. Scarcity alone can't tell a hidden gem from a hidden nothing.
So the model caps any uncurated course at 84 (or 74 if we know nothing about its access or difficulty). The top two tiers — Epic (85–94) and Legendary (95–100) — come from a curated list of roughly 400 courses with real championship history: major hosts, PGA Tour venues, Ryder Cup sites and the perennial top-100 names. Inside that list, courses that have hosted majors or Tour events land in Epic; the handful of icons land in Legendary.
The result is a pyramid, which is what a rarity system should look like:
| Tier | Rarity | Courses | Tier bonus | Example XP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Legendary | 95–100 | 23 | +500 | rarity 99 → 748 XP |
| Epic | 85–94 | 53 | +250 | rarity 90 → 475 XP |
| Rare | 75–84 | 346 | +100 | rarity 80 → 300 XP |
| Uncommon | 50–74 | 2,408 | +25 | rarity 60 → 175 XP |
| Common | 0–49 | 9,864 | +0 | rarity 35 → 88 XP |
How XP is calculated
The formula is deliberately simple:
XP = round(rarity × 2.5) + tier bonus
A common course at rarity 35 pays 88 XP. A Legendary at 99 pays 248 + 500 = 748 XP — about 8.5× more. Before we added the tier bonus the spread was only 3×, and a summer of munis could out-earn a once-in-a-lifetime trip. That felt wrong, so we fixed it.
Two rules keep it honest. First, XP is awarded once per course, on your first check-in; repeat rounds log your score and count for King of the Course but pay nothing. Second, XP is computed on the server when the check-in is saved, so it's the same for everyone regardless of app version.
What rarity is not
- Not a quality ranking. Plenty of Uncommon courses are better golf than some Rare ones. Rarity measures how hard a course is to collect.
- Not price. Green fee isn't an input. Bethpage Black is a state-park muni and rates 97.
- Not fixed. Scores are recomputed as the database improves. If you think a course is rated wrong, tell us — the curated list is edited by hand.
See it in practice
Every course page in the directory shows its rarity, tier and XP, along with the rarest courses in its state. Start with California (three Legendary courses) or Wisconsin (Whistling Straits, Erin Hills, Sand Valley).
Find out what your collection is worth
Check in at every course you've played and Golfy totals the XP. Download Golfy →
