Printable Bourre Score Sheet

Bourré (often spelled Booray) doesn't score points the way most trick games do — it moves money. Every hand is an ante into a shared pot, five tricks are dealt out and fought over, and the pot either gets won outright or rolls forward to the next hand. A sheet for this game has to track pot size and penalties across hands, not a per-player running score, which makes it one of the more unusual layouts on this site.

What actually needs tracking: the pot, not a score

Each hand, every player who stays in antes a fixed amount into the pot. Five tricks are played, and whoever wins the most tricks takes the whole pot. That's straightforward when one player clearly wins three, four, or five tricks — the sheet just needs a column to mark trick counts per player and circle the winner. It gets more interesting on a tie.

The split-pot rule, and why it needs its own tracking

If tricks divide 2-2-1 among three-plus players (or, with five players, 1-1-1-1-1), nobody takes the pot — it's a "split pot," and the money stays in the middle for the next hand, on top of whatever new antes and penalties get added. A sheet that only tracks "who won this hand" loses this information entirely, so the printable layout below carries a running pot total across hands, separate from the per-hand trick tally, specifically so a split pot doesn't quietly vanish from the record.

The bourré penalty column

A player who stays in a hand and wins zero tricks has "gone bourré," and owes the entire pot amount again — doubling what's in the middle for the next deal. This is the single most consequential thing a Bourré sheet needs to record accurately, because it changes the stakes for everyone still playing, and it's easy to miss if the sheet only has room for trick counts. A player who goes bourré is also exempt from the next hand's normal ante, since they're already paying the penalty instead.

Reading a finished hand off the sheet

A completed hand row should show, at a glance: who stayed in versus who dropped out before the deal (a dropped player forfeits only their ante, nothing more), how many tricks each remaining player took, who — if anyone — went bourré and owes the pot, and whether the hand ended in an outright win or a split. Because the pot can carry across several hands during a run of splits or bourré penalties, it's worth writing the running pot total at the start of every new hand's row, not just guessing it from memory partway through a session.

Common recording mistakes

The most frequent error is treating a split pot as "no winner, move on" and forgetting to carry the money forward — the next hand's antes then get added to a pot total that's silently too small. The second is misreading a 2-2-1 split as a win for whichever player happened to take a trick last; a 2-2-1 split has no winner regardless of trick order. Because Bourré is normally played for real money even at casual tables, a wrong pot total is the kind of error that gets noticed immediately by everyone at the table, so keeping the running total visible on the sheet — not just the current hand's trick count — heads that off.

For the full deal, discard, and betting-out rules, see the full Bourré rules, the scoring breakdown for exact penalty math across different player counts, and the dispute page for how a table typically settles a disagreement over a questionable split.

What happens to the pot if everyone but one player drops out before the deal? The remaining player wins whatever is in the pot without playing a hand — most tables still require they hold a legal hand, but no tricks need to be played out since there's no one left to contest them.

Does going bourré with zero tricks cost more than losing normally? Yes — a normal loss (winning one trick when someone else won more) costs only the ante already paid. Going bourré specifically means winning zero tricks while staying in, and it costs the full pot amount again, which is what makes it worth a dedicated column rather than folding it into a generic "loss" mark.

Bourré sits among the trick-taking games on this site's Card Games category hub.