Abstract The paper develops a score-keeping model of illocutionary games and uses it to account for mechanisms responsible for creating institutional facts construed as rights and commitments of participants in a dialogue. After introducing the idea of Austinian games—understood as abstract entities representing different levels of the functioning of discourse—the paper defines the main categories of the proposed model: interactional negotiation , illocutionary score , appropriateness rules and kinematics rules . Finally, it discusses the phenomenon of accommodation as it occurs in illocutionary games and argues that the proposed model presupposes an externalist account of illocutionary practice.