A free scoreboard built around ends instead of periods, with a hammer indicator via possession — and a plain-language guide to how curling scoring actually works, from the house to blank ends to how the hammer changes hands. Works on any club TV or tablet.
Starts you on a Generic board — set periods to 8 or 10 and rename them to Ends in the admin panel. Takes about a minute.
A curling game is played in ends, not periods or quarters — 8 ends for club play, 10 for championship play. In each end, both teams alternate throwing 8 stones apiece (16 total) down the sheet toward the house, the set of circles at the far end. Only one team can score per end. Once all 16 stones are thrown, whichever team has the stone closest to the button (dead center) scores one point for every one of its own stones that's closer to the button than the opposing team's closest stone. If neither team has a stone in the house, or the closest stones are exactly equidistant (rare), the end is scored zero — a blank end. Every other end awards points to exactly one team; the other team gets nothing that end.
The single biggest edge in curling is the hammer — the last stone thrown in an end. Whoever throws last can draw into an open house, knock an opponent's stone out, or freeze onto a guard, all with full knowledge of exactly what they need to do. Hammer possession flips based on the previous end's result: the team that did NOT score gets the hammer next. If an end is blanked (nobody scores), the hammer stays with the same team for the following end, since deliberately blanking is usually done specifically to protect the hammer. A team that scores while their opponent has the hammer has stolen the end — a steal costs the stealing-against team both points and the hammer in the same end, which is why teams with the hammer play so conservatively when the score is close.
Curling has a strong tradition of conceding a game once the outcome is effectively decided — if a team is down by more than they can realistically make up in the ends remaining, especially without the hammer, they'll typically shake hands and concede rather than play out a foregone conclusion. If the score is still tied after the last scheduled end, the game goes to a single extra end: whoever had the hammer in the final scheduled end throws first, handing the hammer to the other team for the decider.
| End | Team Blue | Team Red | Blue Total | Red Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | — | 1 | 0 |
| 2 | — | 2 | 1 | 2 |
| 3 | blank | blank | 1 | 2 |
| 4 | — | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| 5 | 3 (steal) | — | 4 | 3 |
| 6 | — | 2 | 4 | 5 |
| 7 | 1 | — | 5 | 5 |
| 8 | — | 2 | 5 | 7 |
End 3 is a blank — neither team scores, and since Blue had the hammer coming out of end 2 (Red scored last, so Blue got the hammer for end 3), Blue kept the hammer into end 4 by blanking it. End 5 shows a steal: Red had the hammer (since Blue scored in end 4) but Blue scored 3 anyway, taking both the points and the hammer back. By end 8, Red leads 7-5 and the game is decided without needing an extra end.
This is the part that trips up most people watching or scoring their first game, because curling clubs and TV broadcasts display the score two completely different ways. A traditional club scoreboard shows a row of numbers (usually 1 through the maximum possible score) for each team, with small numbered cards hung underneath the running total to mark which end each point was scored in. So if you see the card '5' hanging under Blue's '1' and Red's '2', that means end 5 is where Blue's score reached 1 total and Red's reached 2 total — the big number along the row is cumulative POINTS, and the card underneath it tells you the END that point was reached in. It's easy to misread at a glance because the card numbers (which ends) and the row numbers (how many points) look similar but mean opposite things. A TV-style end-by-end board, by contrast, gives each end its own column and shows exactly what was scored that end (0, 1, 2, 3, or more, with a blank or dash for a blank end), plus a running total column at the far side — closer to how a baseball or cricket scoreboard works, and much easier to read a game's shape from at a glance.
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