Printable Kings in the Corner Score Sheet

Kings in the Corner scores the opposite way most card games do: the player who goes out first scores nothing that round, and everyone else adds up the cards left in their own hand, with the lowest running total across the whole session declared the winner. Because scoring only ever penalizes whoever's slowest, a sheet for this game is entirely about tallying leftover cards accurately, hand after hand.

Valuing the cards left in hand

Kings are the most valuable card left unplayed — worth 10 points each under the most common scoring convention — while every other remaining card is worth its face value or a flat 1 point depending on which house variant a table uses (some groups score all non-Kings at a flat 1 point regardless of rank; others use full face value with Aces high at 25 and other face cards at 10). Because this varies more between households than most games on this site, it's worth writing the chosen convention at the top of the sheet before the first round, the same way a table would agree on Ace's value in Crazy Eights.

Why lower wins, and how far the game usually goes

The player going out scores 0 for that round; everyone else's leftover-card total adds to their running score. Play continues, round after round, until a player's cumulative total reaches an agreed limit — 25 is common for a quick game, 50 for a longer one — and whoever has the lowest total at that point wins, meaning a running-total column needs to be scanned for the minimum, not the maximum, once the game ends.

Reading a round's result

Each round's row should show every player's leftover-hand value (0 for whoever went out) alongside a running cumulative total per player. Because the game can run many rounds before anyone crosses the target, keeping both the per-round figure and the running total visible side by side lets a player spot a bad round immediately rather than only noticing a high cumulative score much later.

A note on the four foundation piles

The game's actual play — building the four King-anchored foundation piles down from each corner in alternating colors — has no direct scoring impact of its own; a sheet doesn't need to track how the piles were built, only the outcome (who went out, what everyone else was left holding). The piles themselves reset with each new deal.

Adjusting for larger groups

Kings in the Corner scales comfortably from two players up to around six, with the hand size shrinking as more players join a single deck (or a second deck being added for larger groups under some house rules). The sheet's column-per-player layout scales the same way regardless of group size — the only real change worth noting is that a game with more players tends to run longer before anyone reaches the target score, simply because more cards are locked away in more hands at any given moment.

Starting layout, building sequences, and when Kings can be played to open a new pile are all covered on the full Kings in the Corner rules page. Round-total math sits on the scoring deep-dive. Which scoring convention a table actually agreed to is a common late-game argument, and the dispute page covers it directly.

Does a player with zero cards left ever score anything for that round? No — going out always scores exactly 0 for that round; the entire scoring system exists only to penalize the cards a player failed to play, so having none left means nothing to score.

What happens if the deck runs out and nobody can go out? Most tables treat this as a blocked round — everyone counts their remaining hand as normal, with no player scoring 0, and the round simply ends without a clean "winner" beyond whoever happens to have the lowest hand value at that point.

Kings in the Corner shares a spot on this site's Card Games category hub with every other deck game covered here.