Jeopardy rules, scoring and wagering

Six categories across, five clues down, values increasing with difficulty. On the show the first round runs $200 to $1,000 and the second round doubles it, $400 to $2,000. A single-round home game normally just uses the first ladder.

The increasing values are not decoration. They are how a player reads difficulty before committing, and they are what makes choosing a square a decision rather than a formality. A board with flat values is a quiz.

• A player picks a category and a value.
• The host reads the clue, which is phrased as a statement of fact.
• Buzzers open once the host finishes reading. Buzzing early locks a player out briefly on the show; at home, simply not opening the buzzers until you finish is enough.
• The first player in gives a response. The show requires it phrased as a question — "What is Lisbon" rather than "Lisbon".
• Correct: the value is added to their score, and they pick the next clue.
• Wrong: the value is subtracted, and the clue reopens to everyone else.
• If nobody answers, the host gives the answer and control stays with whoever picked last.

Control of the board passing to whoever was last correct is the rule most home games forget, and it matters: without it, one player can pick every square all game.

Hidden squares that, when picked, belong to that player alone — no buzzing. They wager before seeing the clue, then answer, and win or lose the amount they wagered.

The wager cap is the part people get wrong. A player may wager up to their current score, or up to the highest clue value on the board, whichever is greater. That second half is what lets a player on $200 make a real bet, and without it a Daily Double early in the game is worth almost nothing.

The show hides one in the first round and two in the second. For a home game, one or two on a single board is about right — more and the scores stop tracking who knew things.

One clue at the end. The category is announced first, everyone writes a wager, then the clue is revealed and everyone writes a response. Correct adds the wager, wrong subtracts it, and all of it resolves at once.

Wagering is where Final is won or lost, and the leader's bet is set by the second-place score rather than by confidence. Going in, Ana has 12,000, Ben 9,000 and Cal 4,000. The most Ben can finish on is 18,000, so Ana wagers 6,001: if she is right she ends on 18,001, one point clear of anything Ben can reach. Both are right, and she wins by exactly that point. Had she missed, she would have dropped to 5,999, which is the price of covering.

A leader with more than double the second-place score can make the game safe: any wager smaller than the gap between their score and twice second place guarantees the win even on a miss. It is worth explaining this to a room once, because it is the moment people realise Final is a strategy question as well as a trivia one.

The wager cap is a player's own score, so a player at zero or below cannot bet. Whether to let them play anyway is your call — in a classroom it is usually worth letting a team at -400 wager a fixed amount, since the alternative is a team with nothing to do during the best part of the game.

Final is the mechanism that keeps a game alive when someone is far ahead, which is why it is the one part of the format worth keeping even when you cut the board down.

Make My Jeopardy applies the rules above so you do not have to track them: the board greys out played clues, correct answers move control, scores update live on the presenter view, and Final Jeopardy collects every wager before the clue is shown. Daily Doubles are a Pro feature; everything else here — the board, buzzers, scoring and Final — is on the free plan and needs no account.