Scoring

Most games award points to the player for completing various tasks. The earliest games awarded points only for dropping tetrominoes, and some even gave a penalty for leaving piece preview turned on.

After Tetris for Game Boy, most games adopted a scoring system designed to reward difficult clears by giving points for more lines cleared at once. Some systems also encouraged starting at higher difficulty.

Original Nintendo scoring system
This score was used in Nintendo's versions of Tetris for NES, for Game Boy, and for Super NES.

For each piece, the game also awards the number of points equal to the number of grid spaces that the player has continuously soft dropped the piece. Unlike the points for lines, this does not increase per level.

The New Tetris
The New Tetris awards "lines": one for each line cleared, one extra line for clearing four lines with one I tetromino, and several lines for clearing parts of a 4x4 square. This does not increase as the game gets faster. Soft and firm drops do not give points; instead, they allow the player to place more tetrominoes (and clear more lines) in the three minute game.

Tetris Worlds
Each mode of Tetris Worlds has its own scoring system. As in The New Tetris, the unit of score in each mode is "lines"; 2-, 3-, and 4-line clears grant additional points in some modes.

Tetris DS
Each mode of Tetris DS has its own scoring system. Most notably, the system used in Standard mode represents a fusion of the 1, 3, 5, 8 pattern used in several modes of Tetris Worlds with the section multiplier of the NES and Game Boy system.