Super Bowl Squares Rules: Every Call You Make Before the Draw

One hundred squares sit on a grid ten across and ten down, each player claims as many as they want at the same fixed price, and the two teams get an axis each, with the home team read along the top and the away team down the left side. Every square costs the same because every square is worth the same.

The digits are what everyone misunderstands on their first board. Nobody picks them, and no square is a better square than any other when you claim it, because the ten columns and ten rows are still unlabelled. A player who gets to choose a position early is choosing a position and nothing more, since the digits that position ends up carrying are unknown to everybody in the room.

A Super Bowl gives you four scoring periods in the three quarter breaks and the end of the game, so most boards pay four winners out of a prize pool the players themselves funded. The classic weighting hands 20 percent after each of the first three quarters and the remaining 40 percent on the last prize, though nothing about those figures is fixed by any rule. Our breakdown of football squares payouts runs that arithmetic at every price point, and how many squares are in a football pool covers the smaller grid formats a tighter group sometimes prefers.

That gives you your first two calls, and both are easier than they look. Run the full hundred squares unless your group is small enough that filling it would be a slog, since a Super Bowl crowd is usually the one night of the year you can actually sell a hundred. Then set the four prizes as real dollar figures rather than percentages of whatever gets collected, because a percentage quietly shrinks the prizes if the board doesn't fill, and the people who did buy in end up covering the empty squares.

The numbers get drawn once every square has been claimed and every payment has landed, and the board locks completely at that moment. There is no rule about drawing a set number of days before kickoff, and hosts who invent one usually end up breaking it, because sign-ups genuinely do run right up to kickoff and sometimes a little past it.

After the digits are assigned, nothing about the board can change: no new entries, no swapped squares, no changed claims and nobody paying late to buy in. A square only had an equal chance while the digits were still unknown, so anyone joining or moving afterwards is choosing a result rather than taking their chances like the people who bought in blind. Selling squares after kickoff carries a quieter cost too, since nobody can follow their numbers while the board is still changing underneath them.

How you draw is up to you, and folded slips out of a bowl still work perfectly well. If you'd rather everyone watch it happen at once, our Super Bowl squares number generator does the randomizing in one press.

Take the last digit of each team's score at the end of the scoring period and find the square where those two digits meet, with the home digit along the top and the away digit down the left. A quarter ending 17 to 10 pays the square at 7 for the home team against 0 for the away team, and a game sitting at 24 to 13 pays 4 against 3.

Two details trip up first-time hosts. Scores are cumulative rather than per-quarter, so the halftime winner comes off the running total at the end of the second quarter, and a team on 21 at half gives you a 1 rather than anything to do with the 14 they added after the first. The other is that a scoreless period still pays, so a first quarter ending 0 to 0 pays whoever holds 0 against 0.

The tiring part of running this on paper is that everybody asks the host where things stand, over and over, all night. Running your Super Bowl squares board on Play Squares removes that, because the grid tracks the score live and highlights the pending winner while the quarter is still being played. For the whole sequence from empty grid to paid winner, our explainer on how Super Bowl squares work walks through it end to end.

A Super Bowl can't end in a tie, so the only overtime ruling you need is what the last prize pays on. Postseason overtime runs in 15-minute periods that keep repeating until somebody wins, with both teams guaranteed a possession in the first one, which is why a February board never needs the tie rule a November board does.

That leaves a genuine choice between paying the last prize on the true final score whenever the game ends, or paying it on the score at the end of the fourth quarter and treating overtime as an unpaid extra. We'd recommend the final score, because it's the score everyone remembers and it keeps every square alive through the most watched part of the night. The end-of-regulation version works fine and some hosts prefer it, but it has to be written down before the draw or somebody will assume the other one.

Super Bowl LI is why that sentence earns its place on your board. Regulation finished 28 to 28, putting the Falcons on an 8 and the Patriots on an 8, and then New England won it 34 to 28 in overtime, which moves the winning square to 8 against 4. Two rules, two squares, two different people collecting the biggest prize of the night. For the ties and repeat-winner cases that come up across a full regular season, our deep dive on football squares rules covers the wider set.

The reverse score rule is the one worth adding on a big casual board, because it doubles the number of people who go home having won something. It pays a second square at every scoring period, holding the same two digits in reverse order, so a quarter ending 17 to 10 pays 7 against 0 and also pays 0 against 7.

The catch is that the reverse prize comes out of the same prize pool rather than from anywhere new, so decide its slice before you collect a dollar. Cover the case where both teams end a period on the same last digit as well, because the forward and reverse squares are then the same square and one person collects both slices.

A square winning twice is the other question that comes up, and the simplest rule is to let it happen and pay again, since that square had the same chance as the other 99. That's the call we'd make on a Super Bowl board without hesitating, because the alternatives all require explaining a second rule to a room that is not listening.

The wider menu is worth knowing exists, even though a first-time Super Bowl board is not the place to reach for it. Touching squares and unlucky-number payouts run alongside the quarter prizes the way the reverse score rule does, while paying on every score change or per minute of game clock are whole formats that replace the quarter prizes rather than joining them, and the score-change version needs a cap or it can outrun the prize pool. Our full football squares rules reference explains how each one works and which ones combine, and our guide to splitting the prize pool works through each with real figures.

Fill the board, and the question disappears. The host, or a few willing players between them, buys the remaining squares at the price everyone else paid, so every square has a real person behind it and the prizes you advertised are the prizes you hand over.

When filling it isn't feasible, the best fallback is rolling an unclaimed prize into the next scoring period, which grows the later prizes and asks nobody to do any arithmetic. Its one gap is the last prize landing on an empty square with no later period to roll into, and you resolve that by either splitting it across the squares that were actually claimed and played, or drawing a random square and paying whoever holds it. Name whichever ending you prefer in advance rather than improvising it on the night.

Two more options work for any unclaimed prize, and our football squares rules reference ranks all four in full. A predetermined next-square-up rule moves the money to another owned square, either by a set step such as adding 7 to each winning digit and wrapping past 9 back to 0, or by a random draw, and both are equally sound because the value lies in having written the rule down first. You can also spread the prize across the other prizes that do have real winners. What never works is quietly shrinking the prize pool to match a half-sold board, because everyone who claimed a square paid full price against the prizes you advertised.

This is the ruling most likely to actually bite you in February, which is why it's worth settling early. A Super Bowl board is a one-off, so there is no next week to make it up on, and the crowd is usually a mix of people who care about the game and people who came for the food, which is exactly the mix that leaves eleven squares open on Sunday morning. Decide now which of the options above you're using and write it on the board, and the worst case becomes a sentence you point at rather than an argument you have.

Seven lines cover a Super Bowl board completely, and all seven belong where players can see them before anybody claims anything. State the price per square, state the actual dollar figure each of the four prizes pays, say that the digits get randomized only once the board is full and paid, say that the board locks at that moment, say whether the reverse score rule is being paid and out of which slice, say whether a repeat winner simply collects again, and say whether the last prize pays on the final score or on the end of regulation. If the board is raising money for a cause, add the share going to it as an eighth line, which our walkthrough of running a Super Bowl squares fundraiser covers in full.

Written rules stop arguments before they start, and they cost you ten minutes on a Tuesday rather than an awkward conversation on Sunday night. Super Bowl LXI is scheduled for February 14, 2027 at SoFi Stadium, which is further away than it sounds once you start selling squares to sixty people. Setting your Super Bowl squares rules out on a Play Squares board puts them in front of every player on the same screen as the grid, and our Super Bowl squares page is the quickest way to see what that looks like.