Most block puzzle games hide their scoring in a corner of the screen and let you guess. When I built Instant Block Puzzle, a free 10x10 block puzzle game that runs in the browser, I wanted the scoring to be something a player could feel without ever reading a rule. Here is how the numbers ended up where they did, and what I would change if I started over.

The two currencies

Every move in a block puzzle earns points in two different ways:

Placement points. You put a piece on the board. Each cell of the piece is worth 1 point.

Line points. You complete a row or column and it clears. This is where the real score lives.

Placement points are deliberately small. If a five-cell piece is worth 5 points and a single cleared line is worth 100, the game quietly tells you what it wants you to do: stop dumping pieces anywhere and start planning clears.

The line table

Clearing one line is worth 100. Two at once is worth 300. Three is 600. Four is 1000.

Notice that this is not linear.…