End of Game Rack Scoring: Who Adds, Who Subtracts

Two endings, and only two

There are two cases at the end of a tile-based word game, and only two.

If somebody goes out, meaning they play their last tile with the bag already empty, then every other player subtracts the value of the tiles still sitting on their rack, and the player who went out adds the combined total of everybody else's leftovers. The player who went out subtracts nothing, because they have nothing left to subtract.

If nobody goes out, and the game simply stops with tiles still on racks, then every player subtracts their own leftover rack and nobody adds anything.

The first case is zero sum: the points that come off the other racks are exactly the points that land on the player who went out, so the table's combined total does not move. The second case only ever goes down.

A worked example where it flips the winner

Two players, Priya and Marcus. Priya plays her last tile with the bag empty. The running scores are Priya 341 and Marcus 355, so Marcus is ahead by 14 and looks like the winner. Marcus is holding J, U and V: 8 plus 1 plus 4, which is 13.

Marcus subtracts 13 and finishes on 342. Priya adds that same 13 and finishes on 354. Priya wins by 12.

A 13 point rack is a 26 point swing across the table, because the same 13 leaves one score and arrives on the other. That is why a stranded J or Q decides games that felt settled two turns earlier.

Now score it the common wrong way, subtracting from Marcus but forgetting to credit Priya. Marcus 342, Priya 341, and Marcus wins by one. Same tiles, same game, different winner. One of those two results is wrong, and it is the second one.

Three players or more: one pot, still zero sum

Dana goes out. Ben is holding F, I and N, which is 4 plus 1 plus 1, so 6. Cara is holding X and E, which is 8 plus 1, so 9.

Ben finishes 6 lower and Cara finishes 9 lower. Dana finishes 15 higher, because the player who goes out collects every other rack and not just the largest one. I ran those exact racks through Rack Up's engine and the adjustments came back as plus 15, minus 6 and minus 9, which sum to zero.

What the engine does

Rack Up's scoring rules live in one shared block of code that the browser version and the phone app both use, and end of game is a single function called finalAdjust. It starts every player at an adjustment of zero. It then walks the players, skips the one who went out, subtracts each remaining player's rack value from that player's own adjustment, and adds the same value into a pot. If somebody went out, the whole pot goes to them.

The skip is the load-bearing line. Anything typed into the leftover box for the player who went out is ignored outright: I typed ZZZ into Dana's row alongside Ben's FIN and Cara's XE, and the adjustments still came back as plus 15, minus 6 and minus 9. Thirty points of Z did nothing, which is right, because a player who went out has no rack.

The mistake is easy to make, and this app made it

That skip was not always there. Until 10 August 2026 the function pooled every typed rack including the one belonging to the player who went out, then paid that player the pot plus their own rack a second time. With QK (10 plus 5, so 15) typed for the player who went out and AA (1 plus 1, so 2) for the opponent, it returned plus 17 and minus 2, where the rule says plus 2 and minus 2. Those sum to plus 15, so fifteen points appeared from nowhere, went to the player already ahead, and were saved into the game history permanently.

The path into that bug is mundane. The finish screen gives every player a leftover box, so somebody types the tiles in front of the winner out of habit, and the arithmetic quietly rewards them for it. A scorekeeping app with a dedicated function for this one job got it wrong and shipped it, so if you are doing this on paper at eleven at night, check that the plus and the minuses cancel.

Edge cases, and what the app will not police

A blank left on your rack is worth zero, there as everywhere else. The engine counts only the letters A through Z, so a question mark or a space typed into the leftover box contributes nothing. The trap is typing the letter instead. A blank you were hoarding for a Q is still a blank, and typing Q into that box charges its holder ten points the rules do not charge.

Going out requires an empty bag. Playing your last tile while tiles remain in the bag just means you draw back up to seven. That rule belongs to the table, not to the app. Rack Up tracks what nobody has seen yet on its Tiles Unseen tab, but it does not check the bag before it hands somebody the pot: whoever you tap gets it.

The 50 point bonus for using all seven tiles belongs to that final play, not to the end of game adjustment. Rack Up keeps them separate, so a player can collect a 50 and a pot in the same breath.

Where standard rules and house rules part company, say so out loud before you total. The rule described above is the standard printed one. Most published rule sets, tournament play included, also end the game after six consecutive scoreless turns, at which point nobody has gone out and everybody subtracts their own rack, while plenty of kitchen tables just agree to stop. Some tables double the leftover total for the player who went out. That is a house variant, not the standard rule, and Rack Up has no switch for it. The app records a pass or a tile swap as a zero point turn and does not end the game for you: you press Finish Game and Score Racks when the table says the game is over, tap who went out (the default is Nobody), and it shows each adjustment next to each name before anything is committed.

Where the app fits

I wrote this out because I have watched the argument happen at a real table, and the arithmetic is small while the swing is not. Rack Up handles it for you: type the leftover tiles, tap who went out, and the plus or minus appears next to each name before you commit. The browser version will do that much for you tonight, free, on the same engine, with nothing to install and nothing to buy. What it cannot do is tell you in a month that this is the fourth game running a stranded Q has taken off you. Past games, the statistics gathered across them and a head to head record live in the paid app, $2.99 once, on Google Play and the App Store.