Trix scoring: why the scoresheet never adds up

The sheet is where Trix goes wrong

Trix has four players and five contracts. You can explain that much at the table in a minute.

The scoring is where it stops being simple. No single hand is hard to count. The trouble is that a full game stacks hand on hand and contract on contract, and all of it ends up on one sheet of paper. Whoever holds the pen is also trying to play their cards.

I build The Smart Trix Calculator, a Trix scorer for iPhone, so I've spent more time than most people thinking about that sheet. This post covers how Trix scoring is put together and why it breaks down on paper. It doesn't include a points table. I explain why at the end.

Five contracts, five small games

The app models five contracts: Kingdom, Queens, Diamonds, Collections and Trix.

It helps to treat them as five separate small games that share a deck and a table. Each one decides in its own way what counts at the end of a hand. So the person keeping score isn't applying one rule over and over. They switch to a different rule every time the contract changes.

That's the first way paper lets you down. The arithmetic is easy. The context switching is not. You tally one contract with the last one's logic still in your head, and nobody notices until the totals stop making sense.

The running total has to stay honest

The second problem is the running total.

A game of Trix isn't scored one hand at a time. It's scored across the whole kingdom. Every hand feeds a total that the whole table relies on. One slip early on carries into every line after it. By the time someone asks why their number looks low, the mistake is several hands back and hard to find.

That's why I describe the scoresheet as one that never adds up. Nobody is careless. The sheet just gives you no way to check your own work as you go.

Nobody remembers three hands ago

The third problem is memory. Scoring depends on the history of the game as well as the current hand. Who bid what? Which contracts has each player already used? A few hands in, the table is relying on whoever remembers best, and that person usually has an interest in the answer.

This is where most Trix arguments begin. Usually nobody is cheating. Paper keeps the numbers and loses the reasons behind them.

What I did about it

When I built the app, I decided to model the rules faithfully and have people enter only what happened at the table. You tap who took what in the hand and the app does the maths. The five contracts are built in, so the scorer never has to switch rules in their head.

The app also keeps the full history of the kingdom, round by round. "Who bid what three hands ago" becomes something you look up instead of something you argue about.

The last piece is stats: win rates, averages and streaks across every game you've played. I'll admit this is less about scoring and more about the conversation after the game. When someone says they always win, the record can answer for them.

There's also an Apple Watch companion, for tables where nobody wants a phone out among the cards.

What I left out, and why

This post has no per-contract points table. I left it out on purpose.

A scoring table is only useful if every number is exactly right. People will settle real arguments with it. I'd rather publish it once, checked line by line against the rules the app uses, than publish it from memory and correct it later. That version is coming.

What this means at your table

If your Trix games keep ending in arguments about the score, the rules usually aren't the problem. The sheet is. Five contracts, one running total and a game-long memory are a lot to ask of a pen and one distracted player.

You can fix that on paper. Write down the contract with every hand, keep a separate column for each player's contracts, and check the totals at the end of every hand, not only at the end of the game.

Or you can put the pen down. That's why I built The Smart Trix Calculator. It's free to try on iPhone, with an Apple Watch companion.