A hundred squares, two random digits on each axis, and four payouts — one per quarter. The final is usually worth double, and the numbers must be drawn only after every square is sold.
A squares pool is a grid. One team runs across the top, the other down the side, and people claim squares by name before anybody knows what they are worth. Once every square is taken, a digit from 0 to 9 is drawn at random for each row and each column.
At the end of each quarter you take the last digit of each team’s score and find the square where they meet. If the Lions lead 17–14, the winning square is the one at row 7, column 4. That person takes that quarter’s share.
Two splits cover almost every board:
The pot is squares times price, not people times price — one person can hold twelve squares. A 100-square board at $5 is a $500 pot, which on the standard split pays $100, $100, $100 and $200.
This one is worth the whole page. Work each quarter out on its own and the four shares will not add up to the pot.
A $250 pot on an even split is 25% four times. Rounded individually that is $63, $63, $63 and $63 — $252. The commissioner has just promised two dollars nobody ever collected, and will find out while standing in a room full of people holding phones.
Overtime does not get a payout of its own, and a board that invents one is taking money from a quarter it already promised.
The final score is the final score. Whoever holds the square matching the score when the game actually ends takes the fourth-quarter share, however long that took. The score at the end of regulation is not a result anybody was playing for.
It happens more often than people expect, especially on a 100-square board in a small office. Decide which of these you are doing before the numbers are drawn, because afterwards every option favors somebody specific:
What does not work is drawing numbers on a board with holes and finding out in the second quarter that the winning square belongs to nobody.
Some boards draw one set of digits for the whole game; others redraw for every quarter. Redrawing spreads the winnings across more people and makes a bad square less of a write-off, at the cost of the running tension of watching one number all afternoon.
Neither is more correct. Say which you are doing on the board itself, so somebody checking at half time can see it without asking.
Pick Ninja draws the digits only once the board is full, works all four shares out against the whole pot so they add up exactly, and pays overtime as the final rather than as a fifth quarter. The grid shows who holds what while it fills, which is most of the fun.
The money is yours. We sell the software to the commissioner and never touch the pot.