Passes and trades

Not every turn ends in a score. Two options live below the word input:

Pass

The player takes no action. Their turn ends, the score doesn’t move, and the next player is up. A pass shows in the turn log as a single italic line — “passed” — with a 0 in the score column.

Common reasons:

• Their rack is unplayable and they don’t want to trade
• The bag is empty and a trade isn’t possible
• Strategic stall near the end of a game

Trade tiles

The player swaps some or all of their rack for fresh tiles from the bag. No tiles land on the board; their score doesn’t move. Trades cost the turn, but cycle out tiles you can’t use.

scrabbleTracker doesn’t model the tile bag in v1 — the tracker is for recording, not enforcement — so the trade button just records the event. The physical bag at the table is the ground truth for what tiles went where.

A trade shows in the log as “traded tiles” with a 0 in the score column.

The six-scoreless rule

Official Scrabble lets either player end a game after six consecutive scoreless turns. Passes, trades, plays scoring zero, and plays overturned by a successful challenge all count. scrabbleTracker watches for this and surfaces a gentle nudge above the End game button:

It’s a suggestion — never enforcement. The table decides whether to end. See Ending a game for the finalize flow.

Why are these called scoreless?

Passes and trades don’t generate a score; overturned plays had their score reverted to zero by the challenge. From the tracker’s perspective they’re all “no score for that turn,” so they all count toward the six-in-a-row rule.