How scoring works

The formula

At the end of a round, each player scores the number of their cards that made it onto the Dutch piles in the middle, minus twice the number of cards still sitting in their Blitz pile.

Score = cards played − (2 × blitz pile remaining)

Emptying your Blitz pile is what ends the round, so whoever calls Blitz subtracts nothing. Everyone else pays two points for every card they did not get rid of.

Why it stings

The doubled penalty is the whole game. Playing lots of cards into the middle feels productive, but if you have been feeding the Dutch piles while your own Blitz pile sits untouched, you can finish a round with a negative score. Negative rounds are common enough that Blitzer shows them in red.

It is why a round can swing the standings harder than it looks, and why the win odds during a game track more than who is ahead.

Worked example

Say a round ends and three players report:

• Dana called Blitz — 14 cards played, 0 left in her Blitz pile. 14 − (2 × 0) = 14.
• Mike — 11 cards played, 2 left. 11 − (2 × 2) = 7.
• Priya — 6 cards played, 7 left. 6 − (2 × 7) = −8.

Priya played six cards and still went backwards. That is normal.

Winning

Rounds keep going until someone crosses the win threshold, 75 by default. Because a strong round is worth double digits, a game is rarely as settled as the standings suggest, which is what the win odds are for.

A small piece of trivia

The story goes that Dutch Blitz was created in part to help teach the designer's children arithmetic. Whether or not that is true, you can see it in the scoring: the doubling is exactly the kind of mental sum that is easy to state and annoying to do forty times an evening. Blitzer does it so you can keep playing.