Jump to the tiles

There is no score, and what people do instead

Updated September 4, 2026 · 2 min read

You do not keep score. The game uses no points, tiles have no point values, and victory goes entirely to the player who finishes their grid and calls Bananas first after too few tiles remain for another Peel.

The short version

  • Play each hand as a pure race with zero points recorded.
  • Count only overall game wins when playing a Best of five series.
  • Trade difficult letters by calling Dump to return 1 tile for 3 fresh ones.
  • Call Bananas when the bunch holds fewer tiles than there are players and your grid is complete.

Letter values do not exist on these tiles. An E appears 18 times in the set and a Q appears only 2 times, but a Q is worth no more points than an E. Difficult letters are merely harder to place into your grid before someone else claims the win.

Each hand is an all-or-nothing race. Players call Split to start, Peel to draw when clear, Dump to trade one unwanted letter for three new ones, and Bananas to finish the hand. Nobody tallies remaining letters or counts grid lengths at the finish.

When players want a longer contest, the official variant is Best of five. A single hand takes about 5 minutes, so the table plays a set of standard games and counts raw wins until someone takes three hands. Nothing else about the rules or calls changes.

The mistake to avoid

The mistake is to assign point values to difficult tiles or count leftover letters at the end. The rules contain no scoring system, so doing this is an unofficial house rule.

Questions that keep coming up

How many points is each letter worth?

Letters have no point values. A difficult letter like Q or Z is worth the same as an E, which is zero points.

How do you win a series across multiple games?

You play the Best of five variant and count game wins. The rules, calls, and tiles stay identical to a standard hand.

Does a player score leftover tiles from opponents?

No. When a player completes their grid and validly calls Bananas, that player wins the hand outright without counting any leftover tiles.