Pinochle

What you get

• Game scorecard Eight hands, one row per partnership, with columns for the bid, trump, meld and trick points.
• Meld and table reference Every meld value for one, two, three and four of a kind, plus bidding and trick-taking notes.
• Five colors Jade, navy, burgundy, slate and blush, all in the one download.
• Your group's name Optional, printed in the header and footer of every sheet.
• Large print option Bigger type on the sheets you write on, for easier reading at the table. Same price.

2 sheets · US Letter landscape, 11 × 8.5 in · vector PDF, sharp at any size · prints in color or grayscale

How pinochle scoring works

Each hand has two parts. First you count meld, the scoring combinations in your hand. Then you play out the tricks.

Every ace, ten and king you take in tricks is worth one point, and the last trick is worth two. That makes exactly 50 trick points in every hand, which is a useful check that nothing was miscounted.

A side's score for the hand is its meld plus its trick points. Play continues until a partnership reaches 500.

What happens when a bid is set

The side that wins the bidding names trump and has to score at least its bid.

If it does, it keeps its meld and trick points as normal. If it falls short, it scores nothing for the hand and the bid amount is subtracted from its total instead.

That means a partnership's score can go backwards, and the sheet leaves room for a negative number.

Meld values

A run in trump is 15, and the aces, kings, queens and jacks around are 10, 8, 6 and 4. A pinochle, the jack of diamonds with the queen of spades, is 4.

Holding two, three or four of the same meld scores much more than double: a second run jumps from 15 to 150.

The reference sheet prints the whole table across all four columns, because those jumps are what people look up.

Single deck plays differently

These values are for the double-deck partnership game, which is what most social groups play.

Single-deck pinochle uses a different meld table and plays to 1,000. The reference sheet has check boxes for recording which your table uses.

Large print

Check the large print box when you customize and the scoring grid comes out with noticeably bigger type and taller rows, which most people find easier to read across a table.

The grid is what grows. Reference panels and the fine print stay at their normal size, so nothing gets squeezed off the page, and the sheet still holds a sensible number of rounds.