NFL Boxes Rules
Everything you need to know before you claim your first square.
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1. How It Works
NFL Boxes is a classic squares pool built around a single NFL game your competition admin chooses when they create the competition. There's a 10x10 grid of 100 boxes — one row per possible last digit (0–9) of the home team's score, one column per possible last digit of the away team's score. Unlike the weekly pick formats, there's no gameweek-to-gameweek play here — it's all about this one game.
Prizes are awarded at four checkpoints during the game: the end of the 1st quarter, half time, the end of the 3rd quarter, and the final score.
2. Claiming Boxes
Click any empty box on the grid to claim it. You can claim up to a maximum number of boxes set by your competition admin, and you're free to release a box you've claimed or claim a different one instead, right up until the deadline.
The digits aren't shown yet while you're picking — you're choosing a position on the grid, not a specific number. Which digits end up on which row and column is decided after the deadline (see section 3), so nobody can pick a box because they already know it's a good one.
3. The Deadline & Number Assignment
The board locks 30 minutes before kickoff of the game it's tied to. At that point:
- If your competition has auto-fill enabled, any boxes still empty are randomly handed out to existing participants, so the whole grid fills up. If auto-fill is off, empty boxes just stay empty.
- A random digit 0–9 is shuffled onto each row, and a separate random shuffle of 0–9 is assigned to each column. This only happens once — it's never re-rolled.
After this point the board is fully locked: no more claiming, releasing, or moving boxes.
4. Winning A Checkpoint
At each of the four checkpoints (Q1, Half, Q3, Final), take the last digit of each team's score and find where those two digits intersect on the grid — whoever owns that box wins that checkpoint's prize.
Example: if the score at a checkpoint is 12–24, take the 2 from the 12 and the 4 from the 24. The box where that row's "2" meets that column's "4" is the winner.
A box can win more than one checkpoint if the same digit pair comes up more than once during the game. Winning boxes are highlighted on the grid as each checkpoint is worked out, which happens automatically as soon as that checkpoint's score is known — the final checkpoint uses the actual final score, including overtime if the game goes there.
5. Unclaimed Boxes & Redistribution
With auto-fill enabled, this section rarely comes into play since the whole grid gets filled before numbers are drawn. But if a competition has auto-fill switched off and a winning box at some checkpoint was never claimed, that checkpoint's prize isn't wasted:
It's redistributed proportionally across whichever other checkpoints did have a winner, weighted by their own percentages. For example, if Q1 (12.5% of the pool) is blank, its share splits across Half, Q3, and Final in proportion to their own percentages — a checkpoint worth twice as much of the original pool gets twice as much of the redistributed share.
6. Prize Breakdown
Your competition admin sets what percentage of the prize pool each of the four checkpoints is worth — the four percentages always add up to 100%. A common split weights Final the highest since it's the "biggest" moment, but every competition can set its own breakdown. The prize pool itself follows the same rules as every other competition type here: it's either free to play, a fixed amount, or the entry fee multiplied by however many people have joined.
The exact percentages (and, once the game finishes, the exact prize amounts) are always shown on the competition's own Boxes page, alongside the grid itself.
7. Settings Your Competition Admin Controls
Every Boxes competition is configured individually by whoever creates it. Before you join, check the competition's own page for:
- Which game the board is tied to
- The maximum number of boxes each player can claim
- The prize percentage for each of the four checkpoints
- Whether auto-fill is enabled for any boxes left unclaimed at the deadline
- Entry fee and prize pool (or whether it's free to play)
- Whether the competition is public or invite-only, and whether it needs a password
These settings can only be changed before the board locks and numbers are assigned — once that's happened, the configuration is fixed for the rest of the competition.
8. What a Competition Admin Can Do
The person who created your competition (its admin/owner) can, until the board locks:
- Rename the competition and toggle whether it's publicly listed
- Send email invites, and share the invite code or invite link
- Change the maximum boxes per player, the prize percentages, and the auto-fill setting
- Mark a player's entry as paid or unpaid, for their own bookkeeping
- Remove a player from the competition
9. What a Competition Admin Cannot Do
To keep every board fair, a competition admin does not have the ability to:
- See or influence which row/column digits get assigned to which position
- Change the settings once the board has locked and numbers have been assigned
- Manually declare a winning box, or override a checkpoint's result
- Change the score or final status of the game — that data comes from the league feed
Platform staff can intervene in exceptional cases — for example correcting a fixture data error — but this is a platform-level safeguard, not something available to competition admins themselves.
10. Joining a Competition
You can join a competition using its invite code, invite link, or by finding it in the public listings — right up until the deadline (30 minutes before kickoff) passes. Once that deadline has gone, the competition is closed to new entrants and the board locks for everyone.
Rules apply to NFL Boxes competitions. See your competition's own page for its specific configuration.
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