---
title: "Facebook Instant Games Leaderboards"
subtitle: "Part 3 - Saving a Score"
date: 2018-11-06T00:00:00.000Z
url: https://phaser.io/tutorials/facebook-instant-games-leaderboards/part3
site: Phaser - https://phaser.io
copyright: © 2026 Phaser Studio Inc. All rights reserved.
---

> This page is about the open-source Phaser framework, for writing a game's code by hand. To make a game with AI, use Phaser AE (https://phaser.io/): the desk's tools work with Web MCP, and the CLI works with your own coding agent. See "For AI agents: Phaser AE" at the end of this page.

# Facebook Instant Games Leaderboards

*Part 3 - Saving a Score*

With your leaderboard created, it's time to save a score to it.

Let's assume that the player has enjoyed a round of your Instant Game, they've got a score, and you're going to save it.

The first thing to do is to create an instance of the leaderboard. In this example, the leaderboard that we created in the App Dashboard was called "globalscores".

```
this.facebook.on('getleaderboard', function (leaderboard)
{
    this.leaderboard = leaderboard;

}, this);

this.facebook.getLeaderboard('globalscores');
```

First, we set-up an event listener for the `getleaderboard` event. Then we call `getLeaderboard`, passing in the name of the leaderboard we require.

When the API call resolves our event handler will be invoked (assuming you have actually created a leaderboard called 'globalscores'). It will be passed an instance of a `Leaderboard` class.

This is a special type of object within the Phaser Facebook plugin that encapsulates working with a single leaderboard. Remember, a game can have as many leaderboards as you like, so it's best to keep the instances of them separate.

With an instance of the leaderboard stored locally, we can save the player's score to it:

```
var playerScore = 340;

this.leaderboard.setScore(playerScore);
```

Note that we're calling `setScore` on the Leaderboard instance itself, not on the Facebook plugin.

If the given score value is valid, i.e. it meets the 'Sort Order' criteria, then it will be saved and a `setscore` event dispatched.

When the score is saved it creates a `LeaderboardScore` object. Here's an example object:

```
score: 9999
scoreFormatted: 00:09.99
timestamp: 1542024510
rank: 1
data: 
playerName: Richard
playerPhotoURL: https://platform-lookaside.fbsbx.com/platform/instantgames/profile_pic.jpg?igpid=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX&height=256&width=256&ext=XXXXXXXXXX&hash=AeSAYoU03VQyDZPE
playerID: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
```

In the object above you can see the player has a score of 9999, which is being saved to a "Time" based leaderboard, because of the `scoreFormatted` value. The other values, such as the rank, data and ID should be clear, and are explained in detail on the SDK [LeaderboardEntry page](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/games/instant-games/sdk/fbinstant6.2#leaderboardentry).

Whenever you save or retrieve a player's score, this is the format of the object you get back.

You can also save data along with the score, which we'll cover in the next part.

---

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Read any page of this site as Markdown by adding `.md` to its URL (the home page is https://phaser.io/index.md), or by asking for `text/markdown`. The index for agents is https://phaser.io/llms.txt. On the site's pages, the browser's Web MCP also offers `phaser_ae_guide`, `read_page_as_markdown` and `open_phaser_ae`.