A printable Dominion score sheet lives or dies on a deck that no longer exists as a deck. For the whole game every player's cards are split across a draw pile they may not look through, a discard pile they may not search, a hand and a play area — and then, at the end of one player's turn, the Province pile is empty or a third Supply pile runs out, and every one of those piles is gathered up and counted at once. The total that decides the game is built in that single count, from cards that were never all visible together before it, and it contains one number that punishes a small error three times over: Gardens, worth one point for every ten cards in the entire deck, rounded down, applied separately to every copy a player owns. Miscount a 40-card deck as 39 and you have not lost one point — you have lost one point on every Gardens in it. Scoop the decks back into their boxes, as tables do the moment a winner is announced, and that count can never be rebuilt, because nobody recorded how many cards each deck held, how many Curses were hiding in each discard pile, or how many turns each tied player had actually taken. That is the argument this sheet exists to end. Two players finish level, the winner is not decided by a recount of Provinces at all — it is the tied player who took the fewest turns — and if turn counts were never written down, the tiebreak is a memory contest about a game that lasted an hour. That is the seller this vertical rewards. Not the seller with the prettiest castle border, because the cards already come in the box and your buyer owns them. The seller whose sheet counts each Victory card type on its own line, records the total number of cards in each deck before any Gardens is valued, writes down every Curse as its own negative line, prints the tiebreak in full — fewest turns, then a shared victory — and is filled in before a single deck is boxed, so the argument ends at the sheet instead of starting there.
What a printable Dominion set actually contains (and why it is counts per card type, not one total)
A Dominion set is not a generic tally pad with a crown on it, and designing it as one is the first error in this niche. At minimum a serious set contains five things.
First, the score sheet itself, built for up to four players. Each player needs a separate count line and a separate points line for Estates, Duchies and Provinces, a count line for any Kingdom Victory cards in the game, a Curse line that is plainly negative, and a total line that is the sum of those lines and nothing else. One box labelled "score" gives a buyer a place to write the current rumour. Separate lines give them the audit trail that settles which card type the rumour went wrong in — and in Dominion the wrong line is usually not the Province line everyone watched, but the Estate or Curse line nobody counted carefully.
Second, a deck-size strip that is filled in before Gardens is valued. For each player: the total number of cards in the whole deck — draw pile, discard pile, hand and play area combined — written as a number, then the division by ten with the remainder discarded, then that figure multiplied by the number of Gardens copies. A sheet that values Gardens from an estimated deck size has built its most error-sensitive line on a guess, and a sheet that records no deck size at all can never be checked after the decks are separated again.
Third, a turn-count strip. One small box per player, updated as the game goes or completed at the end from the starting player and the player whose turn ended the game, recording how many turns each player took. It looks like bookkeeping nobody needs, right up to the tied finish, when it is the only thing that decides the winner — and it cannot be reconstructed reliably once the table has moved on.
Fourth, a game-end record: which condition ended the game — the Province pile empty, or three Supply piles empty, and which three — plus the starting player. This is not nostalgia. Disputes about whether the game should have ended a turn earlier are disputes about whether the final turn, and the Province bought on it, should count at all, and the sheet that recorded the piles at the moment of ending settles it.
Fifth, the files themselves in the formats a download buyer actually prints: a clean US Letter version, an A4 version that does not shrink the count lines into handwriting traps, a multi-game league version for groups who play weekly and burn through sheets, and a large-print version. Dominion finishes with forty or more small cards per player spread across a table. Type that was legible in your design preview is not the test; the test is a tired player counting a discard pile correctly while three other decks wait to be counted.
The rules every buyer assumes (and the checks that enforce them)
Get any of these wrong on the sheet and the sheet is wrong, however pretty it is — so check a draft against this list before you list it.
The game ends at the end of a player's turn, when either the Province Supply pile is empty or any three Supply piles are empty. Not at the moment the last Province is bought mid-turn, and not after everyone gets one more turn — the turn finishes, then the count happens. Supply piles include Kingdom piles, Treasure piles and the Curse pile, so a game can end on three emptied piles that contain no Provinces at all. A sheet whose end record only asks about Provinces will misrecord exactly the fast, engine-driven games that end on piles.
Scoring counts every card a player owns, wherever it is. Each player gathers all of his cards — draw pile, discard pile, hand and anything left in the play area — into one deck and counts the victory points on all of them. Cards a player trashed during the game are not in that deck; they sit in the Trash and score nothing, which is why a player who trashed two Estates has two fewer points than a count of everything he ever bought would suggest. A sheet that does not say, in print, that trashed cards are excluded invites the one recount argument this game reliably produces.
The basic values never change. An Estate is worth one point, a Duchy three, a Province six, and a Curse minus one, every time, in every game. Every player started with three of those Estates inside a ten-card deck of seven Coppers and three Estates, so every player started the game holding three points — and a final Estate count below three means Estates were trashed or the count is wrong, a check a good sheet makes easy and a one-box sheet makes impossible. Treasure and Action cards, and any coins left unspent, are worth nothing at the end.
Gardens is the variable line, and it is valued from the whole deck. A Gardens is worth one victory point for every ten cards in your deck, counting all of your cards, rounded down: a 39-card deck makes each Gardens worth three, a 40-card deck makes each worth four. Every copy uses the same deck size, so the error multiplies by the number of copies — three Gardens in a deck miscounted across the 39-to-40 boundary is a three-point swing, larger than a Duchy. This is why the deck-size strip comes before the Gardens line on the sheet, not after it, and why the total card count is recorded even in games with no Gardens in the Kingdom: the count is also how a table proves a deck was counted whole and not from the discard pile alone.
Kingdom Victory cards change the lines, not the method. Gardens is the base game's variable card, but other sets add their own Victory cards with their own printed or variable values. A base-game sheet needs labelled blank lines for the Kingdom Victory cards actually in the game, filled in from the cards on the table — pre-printing one fixed list teaches the buyer that the list is the game, and the first kingdom without Gardens makes the sheet look broken.
The tiebreak is fewest turns, then shared. If the highest scores are tied, the tied player who has had the fewest turns wins — the later players in turn order have played one turn fewer in many finished games, and that is a real, common way for the second or third player to win a tie. If the tied players have had the same number of turns, they share the victory; there is no further tiebreak, no recount and no play-off. A sheet whose tiebreak strip invents a Province count or a coin count as a decider is making up a rule the game does not have.
Pile sizes explain counts that look wrong. In a two-player game the Estate, Duchy and Province piles hold eight cards each; in a three- or four-player game they hold twelve, and Kingdom Victory piles such as Gardens follow the same eight-or-twelve sizing while other Kingdom piles hold ten. The Curse pile holds ten cards for two players, twenty for three and thirty for four. A table that cannot account for its Provinces should check the pile size it started with before it accuses a count — the sheet's setup line, recording player count and pile sizes, is what makes that check possible.
And the expansions change the product, not the margins. Other sets add Victory cards that score from sets, from trashed cards, from tokens and in ways the base sheet has no lines for, and Colony games add a second top-value Victory card and a third way for the game to end. A base-game sheet does not record an expansion game honestly, and claiming it does is how a five-star listing earns a one-star review from the one buyer who checked.
A worked game, and the arithmetic, checked the hard way
Invent three players and count them in the open, the way your sheet will have to. Gardens is in tonight's Kingdom, and the game ends at the end of Ben's turn, when a third Supply pile empties. Ana started the game, so Ana and Ben have each taken seventeen turns and Cleo, third in order, has taken sixteen.
Ana's deck holds forty cards in total. She counts four Provinces, worth twenty-four; three Duchies, worth nine; four Estates, worth four; two Gardens, and at forty cards each Gardens is worth four — eight in all; and one Curse, worth minus one. Her non-Victory cards number twenty-six: fourteen Victory and Curse cards plus twenty-six others is the forty her Gardens line was valued from. Her lines read 24, 9, 4, 8, minus 1 — a total of 44.
Ben holds the best Province line at the table and finishes third, which is the point. His deck holds thirty-seven cards: five Provinces, worth thirty; two Duchies, worth six; three Estates — exactly his starting three — worth three; one Gardens, worth three at thirty-seven cards, because thirty-seven divided by ten rounds down to three; and two Curses, worth minus two. Thirteen Victory and Curse cards plus twenty-four others makes thirty-seven. His lines read 30, 6, 3, 3, minus 2 — a total of 40.
Cleo's deck is the biggest at the table, forty-five cards, and the sheet rewards recording it exactly. Three Provinces, worth eighteen; three Duchies, worth nine; five Estates, worth five; three Gardens, each worth four at forty-five cards, for twelve; and no Curses. Fourteen Victory and Curse cards plus thirty-one others makes forty-five. Her lines read 18, 9, 5, 12, 0 — also 44.
Now the tiebreak, in order, from the strip nobody boxes a deck before filling in. Ana and Cleo are level on 44. There is no recount and no second scoring pass: the tied player with the fewest turns wins, and Cleo's sixteen turns beat Ana's seventeen. Cleo wins the game — not on Provinces, where Ben beat her by twelve, and not on Gardens alone, which are already inside the 44, but on a turn count that exists only because the sheet recorded it. Had the sheet recorded only totals, this game ends in an argument about who took how many turns an hour ago. Check the totals by hand before you trust them in a listing graphic: 44, 40, 44, settled sixteen turns to seventeen. If your sheet cannot produce those lines, card type by card type, deck size first, it is not finished.
What the channels actually take from a low-priced set
A score-sheet set is a low-priced download, which means the channel's arithmetic, not your effort, decides most of your margin — and it differs enough by channel that the same file is a good product in one shop and a bad one in another.
On a marketplace with a per-listing fee and a percentage, a cheap set pays the fixed slice on every single sale, so the percentage you think you are paying understates the real cut most at exactly the price point score sheets sell at. Bundling solves part of this honestly: a base set, an expansion set and a league pack sold as one listing pay the fixed fee once on a larger basket, which is a pricing reason to bundle quite apart from the buyer's convenience.
On a percentage-only platform, the same bundle logic runs the other way: there is no fixed per-sale sting, but a flat percentage of a small price is still small money, and the platform that handles tax as merchant of record is taking a real job off your desk along with its cut. That job comes back the moment you sell from your own site, where a flat monthly delivery cost beats a percentage only after a volume threshold most first listings have not reached yet — do the breakeven on your own numbers, at your own price, before moving anything.
Delivery is part of channel economics too, even when nobody lists it as a fee. A buyer who cannot find the file, whose link expires before the weekend game, or whose A4 print clips the tiebreak strip does not usually ask for help first — they refund or they review. Every support email a clean delivery prevents is margin, because your time is the only cost line that scales with every mistake in the file.
That is also why the honest caveats belong in the listing, not in a reply after purchase. This kind of tool — and FileFreight is the one this guide's author sells from, flat monthly, no per-sale cut — does not handle your taxes or act as your merchant of record, does not import your existing listings from another platform for you, and is not a native app inside a marketplace. A buyer who needs those things should buy the tool that does them. A buyer who mainly needs the right file to reach the right buyer, with the download logged, is the buyer a score-sheet set is built for, and saying so plainly is what keeps the reviews about the sheet instead of about the checkout.
The three delivery failures specific to a game scored once, after the decks are combined
Most digital delivery failures are generic. These three are specific to a product whose entire value is one end-of-game count over decks of forty or more cards, and each one maps to a complaint pattern sellers in this niche repeat.
The first is the boxed deck. Dominion's count happens once, at the very end, often while someone is already sorting cards back into the box by type — which destroys the per-player decks the count depends on. The buyer prints your sheet, reaches the Gardens line, and finds there is no deck left to count, because the sheet gave them one slow total to build while the evidence was being sorted away. This is a sheet-design failure before it is a buyer failure: the set needs a count-in-order prompt — combine each deck, record its total size, count each Victory type line by line, Curses last before the total — that gets a deck recorded before anyone's tidying instinct reaches it.
The second is the wrong-version delivery. The buyer purchases the set with the expansion version, receives or opens the base file — because the files were named alike, zipped together carelessly, or attached in the wrong order — and discovers at the table that the sheet has no lines for the Victory cards their game actually used. Version discipline is delivery discipline: one clearly named file per version, the player count on the cover page of each, and a first page that says which game this sheet scores and which it does not.
The third is the dead link on game night. Score sheets are bought close to use — often the day of the game. An expiring link with a short window, a delivery email eaten by a spam filter, or a download limit consumed by the buyer's own failed first attempts all land at the worst possible hour, when there is no support reply fast enough to save the evening. Generous download windows, a recovery path a buyer can use without emailing you, and a delivery log you can check when someone writes in are not luxuries in this niche. They are the product working at the moment it was bought for.
Editions and occasions are different products
The base game and the expansion game are two recording problems, not one sheet with extra columns. Added Victory cards change what needs logging; a sheet stretched to cover everything covers each thing badly. Sell the base set cleanly first. List an expansion set as its own product, with its own worked example, when you have actually recorded a game on it — and keep Colony games out of both, because a second top-value Victory card and its own end condition are a different formula, not a variant of this one.
Occasions split the catalogue the same way. A weekly league wants many sheets cheaply, room for four decks a night, and season standings space. A one-off game night wants one beautiful sheet and the tiebreak strip impossible to miss. A gift buyer wants the set to look like an object, not a spreadsheet. These buyers search differently, review differently and refund for different reasons, and a listing trying to speak to all three usually converts none of them well. Pick the occasion your file actually serves and write the listing to that table, that night, that argument about a deck nobody counted whole.
Print format is an edition too. A fillable version a buyer can complete on a tablet at the table is a genuinely different product from a print-only pad — different checks, different failure modes, different buyer. If you offer both, deliver both as clearly separate files. If you offer one, say which, in the first screen of the listing, before the price does its persuading.
The setup that prevents all three (and when to stay put)
The setup that prevents the boxed deck, the wrong version and the dead link is boring, which is why it works. Build each version as its own file with the paper size in the filename. Test-print every file at full size and record a worked game on paper — use the 44, 40, 44 game above if you like; a sheet that cannot hold it cannot hold a real one. Attach exactly the files the listing promises, in the order the listing names them. Set download limits and expiry generously enough that a buyer preparing on Friday for a Saturday game is never locked out of their own purchase, and keep a delivery record you can actually look up when a buyer writes in, so "I never got it" is a lookup, not an investigation.
Stay put, though, if your current channel is not actually failing you. If your sheets are selling, delivering cleanly and reviewing well where they are, moving them for a theoretical saving costs you search position and a working setup, and no fee table repays that. Move when the numbers at your volume say the cut is the problem, when delivery failures are reaching your inbox, or when a buyer segment you want — the league that buys the big bundle, the expansion table that needs its own lines — is one your current setup cannot serve properly.
Dominion will keep ending the same way it always ends: not with an argument about the Provinces, which everyone saw bought, but with two totals level, the decks already sorted back into the box, and someone asking — too late — how many cards were in the Gardens player's deck, and who actually took fewer turns. The seller who wins this niche is not the one with the prettiest castle illustration. It is the one whose sheet recorded the game the way the rules count it — every Victory card on its own line, every deck counted whole before Gardens was valued, every Curse written as the negative it is, and turn counts captured before the cards came apart. Build that sheet, print it, record Cleo's sixteen-turn tiebreak win on it by hand, and only then list it.
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