A printable Scythe score sheet lives or dies on a number nobody wrote down while it still mattered: popularity. Scythe does not score your board directly. It scores your board three times over — once for stars, once for territories, once for every pair of resources — and it prices all three of those counts from a single popularity tier that is read once, at the end, after the sixth star has already ended the game immediately and there are no more turns to fix anything. That is why the argument in Scythe is never really "how many territories do you have." It is "you were on twelve popularity, not thirteen," said with complete confidence by a player whose entire score drops a tier if they are right and rises a tier if they are wrong. Or "the Factory is one territory," about a hex the rules count as three. Or "thirteen resources is thirteen points," about a category that pays only for pairs and quietly wastes the odd token. Or the structure bonus left off entirely, because the structures are no longer controlled and half the table assumes that means they no longer count. Every disputed Scythe finish is the same dispute in different clothes: three multiplications by a tier, performed once, in heads, from a board that stops existing the moment the mechs come off the map. That is the seller this vertical rewards. Not the seller with the moodiest mech artwork, because the board comes in the box and your buyer already owns it. The seller whose sheet records the game in the order the rules score it — popularity first, tier printed, then stars, territories with the Factory counted honestly, resource pairs with the odd one shown as wasted, the structure bonus on its own line, and coins in hand added last — so the argument ends at the sheet instead of starting there.
What a printable Scythe set actually contains (and why the tier needs a table, not a total)
A Scythe set is not a pad of identical blanks. At minimum a serious set contains five things, and the first one is the one most listings skip.
First, the scoring sheet itself, built for up to five players in the base game — seven only if you are deliberately building the expansion version, which is a different product, covered below. Each player column needs, in scoring order: final popularity and the tier it lands in; the three tier prices that tier sets, printed on the sheet, not left to memory; stars placed, multiplied by the star price; territories controlled, with a separate box for the Factory so it can be counted as three territories rather than argued as one; resources controlled, recorded as a raw count and then as pairs, with the odd leftover visibly discarded; the structure bonus, taken from the one bonus tile drawn that game; coins in hand; and the total. A sheet that gives a buyer one empty box labelled "score" has given them a place to write the answer to an argument, not a way to settle it.
Second, a tier table printed on every sheet. The popularity track pays in three bands, and a buyer should never have to reconstruct them at midnight: low popularity pays $3 per star, $2 per territory and $1 per pair of resources; middle popularity pays $4, $3 and $2; high popularity pays $5, $4 and $3. One coin of difference per category sounds small until it is multiplied by six stars, ten territories and eight pairs at once — a one-tier misread is routinely a twenty-coin swing, which is larger than most winning margins.
Third, a star checklist. A player can place at most six stars, and the game ends the instant the sixth is placed by anyone. The nine ways to earn one — all six upgrades, all four mechs, all four structures, all four recruits, all eight workers on the board, one completed objective, combat wins up to two, 18 popularity, 16 power — are worth printing as a tick list, because "did I already take my second combat star" is a real mid-game question and because the sheet should show who triggered the end and how.
Fourth, a tie-break strip. Scythe ties are not shared and they are not replayed: they break, in order, on the total number of workers, mechs and structures a player has, then power, then popularity, then resource tokens controlled, then territories controlled, then stars placed. Almost no home-made sheet prints that order, and it is needed exactly once — on the one night two totals come out equal and nobody at the table can agree what counts next.
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 player columns into handwriting traps, a multi-player-per-page league version for groups who play weekly and burn through sheets, and a large-print version. Scythe players are often scoring in low light at the end of a two-hour game. Type that was legible in your design preview at noon is not the test; the test is a tired player reading a tier row correctly at the end of the night.
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 immediately when a player places their sixth star. Nothing else happens after that except end-game scoring: no finishing the round, no one last produce action, no "but I was about to." A sheet that leaves room for a final round is teaching a wrong rule.
Popularity is scored in tiers, and the tier is read from final popularity, once. Low, middle and high popularity pay $3/$2/$1, $4/$3/$2 and $5/$4/$3 respectively for stars, territories and resource pairs. The worked example in the rules is the check to print against: at 10 popularity a player earns $4 for every star, $3 for each territory and $2 for every two resources. If your tier table does not reproduce that line exactly, your table is wrong.
Coins in hand count, in full, on top of the scoring categories. They are not a separate victory track and they are not replaced by end-game coins — the final fortune is the coins you already had plus everything scoring adds.
Territories are hexes you control, including lakes, and home bases are not territories. You control a territory where you have a worker, a mech or your character, or where you have a structure with no enemy unit on it. Only one player controls a territory at a time.
The Factory counts as three territories to the player who controls it. This single line is worth its own box on the sheet, because counting it as one is the most common honest scoring error in the game and at high popularity it is an eight-coin error on its own.
Resources score in pairs, and only in pairs. Every two resource tokens you control pay once; an odd thirteenth token pays nothing. Workers are not resources. You control the resources sitting on territories you control — resources on a territory you have lost are not yours, however hard you produced them. The rules' own arithmetic is the test: 13 resources at 10 popularity pay for six pairs, $12, not thirteen of anything.
The structure bonus pays from the single structure bonus tile selected for that game, based on the structures you built, and you collect it even if you do not control the territories those structures stand on at the end. A sheet that only scores structures you still control will underpay somebody in most games.
Ties break in a fixed order — workers plus mechs plus structures, then power, popularity, resources, territories, stars — and the winner may sign the achievement sheet. A score sheet that ends at "total" has stopped one step before the game does.
And the expansions change the product, not the margins. Invaders from Afar takes the game to seven players and adds factions; The Rise of Fenris and The Wind Gambit change end-game conditions in their own ways. A base-game sheet does not score 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 finished players and score them in the open, the way your sheet will have to.
Ana triggered the end by placing her sixth star. She finishes on 10 popularity — the middle tier, $4 per star, $3 per territory, $2 per resource pair. Six stars pay $24. She controls eight ordinary territories plus the Factory, which counts as three, so she scores ten territories for $30. She controls 13 resources, which is six pairs and one wasted token, for $12. Her structure bonus is $6 and she holds $10 in coins. Total: 10 + 24 + 30 + 12 + 6 = $82.
Ben placed only four stars and did not end the game. He finishes on high popularity, where the same board is priced at $5, $4 and $3. Four stars pay $20. Seven territories pay $28. Ten resources are five clean pairs, paying $15. His structure bonus is $9 and he holds $18 in coins. Total: 18 + 20 + 28 + 15 + 9 = $90.
Cleo looks like the winner before the tiers are applied. She holds the most coins in hand, $22, controls the most territories, eleven, and the most resources, sixteen. But she finishes on low popularity, priced at $3, $2 and $1. Five stars pay $15. Eleven territories pay $22. Sixteen resources are eight pairs paying just $8. Her structure bonus is $4. Total: 22 + 15 + 22 + 8 + 4 = $71.
Ben wins on $90 despite placing the fewest stars and controlling fewer territories than Cleo, because popularity is not a tie-break flavour in Scythe — it is the price list for everything else. Ana, who ended the game, finishes second, and her sheet line is the one that teaches the Factory rule: count the Factory as one territory instead of three and she loses another $6 and the argument starts. Cleo's line teaches the harder lesson your buyers are really paying for: the board leader on raw counts can finish last, correctly, and a good sheet is what lets the table accept that result in two minutes instead of relitigating it for twenty. Check the three totals by hand before you trust them in a listing graphic. 82, 90, 71. If your sheet cannot produce those three lines, cell by cell, 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 a player column 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 by tiers
Most digital delivery failures are generic. These three are specific to a product whose entire value is a tier table and a grid, and each one maps to a complaint pattern sellers in this niche repeat.
The first is the clipped tier table. The buyer prints the file, the right-hand player column or the high-popularity row falls outside the printable area on their paper size, and the sheet still looks usable — until the end of the game, when the one row they need is half off the page. This is a file-construction failure, not a printer failure: margins tested on one paper size only, columns added until the grid fit the design instead of the page. Test-print both paper sizes, at 100 percent, on a cheap home printer, and score a full five-player game on the printout before listing.
The second is the wrong-version delivery. The buyer purchases the set with expansions, 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 there are five player columns for a seven-player game. 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, the seven-player expansion game and the campaign-style expansion game are three scoring problems, not one sheet with extra columns. Player count changes the grid; added factions and modules change what needs recording; 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 scored a game on it.
Occasions split the catalogue the same way. A weekly league wants many sheets cheaply, large grids, and season standings space. A one-off game night wants one beautiful sheet and the tier table 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 popularity tier.
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 clipped table, 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 score a worked game on paper — use the 82, 90, 71 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 seven columns — is one your current setup cannot serve properly.
Scythe will keep ending the same way it always ends: suddenly, on somebody's sixth star, with five boards full of things that are worth exactly as much as the popularity underneath them. The seller who wins this niche is not the one with the darkest mech illustration. It is the one whose sheet prices that board correctly, in the open, tier by tier — Factory as three, odd resource wasted, bonus paid even on a lost territory — while the mechs are still on the map to check it against. Build that sheet, print it, score Ben's $90 win on it by hand, and only then list it.
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