A printable Stone Age score sheet lives or dies on a feeding round nobody can recount. Every round each player sends figures out to hunt, chop, dig and build, and then every figure comes home hungry: one food per person, no exceptions, no partial credit. The agriculture track pays some of that bill for free, the food tokens pay the rest, and when the food runs out the player faces the one decision in the game that a score sheet either records honestly or turns into an argument: spend resources as food, one for one, or take the penalty. The penalty is where the argument lives, because it is flat. It is ten points, always ten, no matter whether one figure went unfed or five did — and it is paid after all the player's food is spent, not instead of it. A sheet that cannot show, round by round, how many figures were fed, how much agriculture paid, how much food was on hand, how many resources were burned as food, and whether the ten-point penalty was taken is not a score sheet at all. It is a souvenir of an argument. The seller this vertical rewards is the one whose sheet records the game the way the rules score it — the feeding ledger, the dice yields, the civilisation-card multipliers and the endgame tally, all on one auditable page — so that when two totals finish close, the difference is read off the sheet instead of argued from memory.
What a printable Stone Age set actually contains (and why it is a feeding ledger, not a tally pad)
A Stone Age set is not a generic score pad with a cave painting on it, and designing it as one is the first error in this niche. At minimum a serious set contains five things.
First, the feeding ledger itself, one row per round. Each row needs five boxes: figures on the board that round, agriculture level, food on hand, resources burned as food, and penalty taken. The agriculture box is the one most sets get wrong by omission: agriculture pays one food per level automatically, before a single token is spent, so a player with agriculture 3 and five figures needs only two food from stock, not five. A ledger with no agriculture column will overcharge that player every round, and the overcharge compounds — food saved in round three is food that buys a building in round six. The penalty box needs a yes-or-no tick, not a number: the penalty is ten, flat, and a box that invites the player to write "30" for three unfed figures has already mis-scored the game.
Second, a dice-yield worksheet. Stone Age pays resources by division, and every division rounds down: hunting pays one food per full two on the dice, wood one per full three, clay one per full four, stone one per full five, gold one per full six. A roll of 11 at the hunting grounds is five food, not five and a half, and a roll of 9 at the quarry is one stone, not almost two. The worksheet needs one line per gathering trip: workers placed, dice total, tools added, divisor, yield. The tools column matters because a tool is spent once per round and then flipped until the next round — a player who "uses" the same tool on three trips in one round has invented resources that do not exist. The worksheet exists so that no yield survives the round it was claimed in without its arithmetic attached.
Third, a civilisation-card multiplier tracker. Every civilisation card has two halves: the top half is an immediate benefit, spent and forgotten; the bottom half is a final-scoring multiplier that only matters at the end. A player who tracks only the top halves arrives at the endgame with a pile of cards and no record of what they multiply. The tracker needs one row per card, with the multiplier written in the player's own shorthand — per person, per tool, per agriculture level, per building type — plus a running count of the thing it multiplies. The count column is the product: a multiplier without its count is a promise, not a score.
Fourth, a building score log. Buildings score immediately, in two kinds: fixed buildings pay the number printed on them, and variable buildings pay per resource spent — wood three, clay four, stone five, gold six. A building bought with a wood, a clay and a gold is worth thirteen, and the log needs the resource breakdown, not just the total, because the breakdown is what lets a disputed building be re-added from the sheet. A log that records only totals will agree with everyone and prove nothing.
Fifth, an endgame tally box that prints the formula, not just a blank total. Final score equals track points earned during the game, minus food penalties taken, plus civilisation-card multipliers, plus one point per leftover resource on the board. A sheet whose final box has no penalty line, no multiplier line and no leftover-resource line cannot produce a total anyone else can check — and a total nobody else can check will be checked by whoever shouts longest.
And the files themselves in the formats a download buyer actually prints: a clean US Letter version, an A4 version that does not shrink the feeding ledger into handwriting traps, a multi-game league version for groups who play weekly and burn through sheets, and a large-print version. Stone Age tables are crowded by the late game, when every player has extra figures, tools and cards. Type that was legible in your design preview is not the test; the test is a tired player writing a feeding row correctly while three other tribes wait to be fed.
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.
Feeding follows a fixed order, and the sheet must print it. First, agriculture pays: one food per agriculture level, from the supply, free. Then the player pays one food per figure from stock. If food is short, the player must first spend all the food they have, and may then cover the shortfall one-for-one with resources of any kind — a wood, a clay, a stone or a gold each counts as one food. Only if the player cannot or chooses not to cover the shortfall does the penalty apply, and it is a flat ten victory points, regardless of how many figures went unfed, and the player's score can go negative. A sheet that prices the penalty per unfed figure will over-penalise exactly the player who can least afford it, and a sheet that lets a player keep unspent food while taking the penalty has invented a bargain the rules never offered.
Dice yields divide and round down, always. Hunting divides by two, forest by three, clay pit by four, quarry by five, river by six. Tools add to a dice total before the division, each tool usable once per round, and multiple tools may be spent on one roll — a player with three tools who rolls 9 at the quarry may spend one tool to reach 10 and take two stone instead of one, and that is the whole point of the tool hut. A sheet with no tool-spent column will let one tool work three jobs in a round, and a sheet with no divisor column will let a remainder become a resource.
Placement has its own counts, and the sheet's instructions must state them. The tool hut takes one figure and raises the tool level by one. The field takes one figure and raises agriculture by one. The hut that gains a new person takes two figures. A sheet that lets a single figure do the work of two has given a player a person the game never granted.
The game ends on one of two triggers, and the sheet must print both. Either a building stack runs out at the end of a round, and the round is finished, or there are not enough civilisation cards to refill the four market spaces at the start of a round, and the game ends at once. A sheet that implies a fixed number of rounds is describing a different game, and a group playing to the wrong trigger will score a game that should never have ended — or refuse to end one that already has.
Three anchor numbers keep a draft honest. A starvation penalty is ten points, flat, whether one figure or five went unfed. A roll of 11 hunting is five food, because eleven divided by two rounds down to five. And a variable building bought with one wood, one clay and one gold is worth thirteen points, three plus four plus six. If your sheet's worked example contradicts any of those, the sheet is wrong, not the rulebook.
A worked game, and the arithmetic, checked the hard way
Two players reach the endgame with the tallies below. Track points are points scored during the game from buildings and civilisation cards, before penalties and multipliers. The multiplier figures are the bottom halves of the civilisation cards each player holds, applied to the counts on their boards. Leftover resources score one point each.
Dana: track points 72. One starvation round: in that round Dana had six figures, agriculture 2 and one food on hand — two plus one is three food against six mouths, a shortfall of three — and chose to keep her gold for a building rather than burn resources as food, so she spent all her food and took the flat ten-point penalty: 72 minus 10 is 62. Multipliers: two cards each paying one point per person, and Dana has six people, five starting figures plus one gained, for twelve. Leftover resources: seven, for seven. Dana's total: 62 plus 12 plus 7 is 81.
Eli: track points 70, no penalties. Multipliers: one card paying one point per agriculture level, and Eli's agriculture is 5, for five. Leftover resources: three, for three. Eli's total: 70 plus 5 plus 3 is 78.
Dana wins by three, 81 to 78 — and the sheet proves it without a single die being re-rolled, because the feeding rows, the multiplier counts and the leftover counts are all written down. Change one line and the result changes with it: had Dana's starvation been counted per unfed figure — three unfed figures at ten points each, thirty instead of ten — her total would have fallen to 61, and Eli would have won a game he actually lost by three. Had one of Dana's people been forgotten from the multiplier count, she would have lost two points and the margin would have been a single point argued from memory instead of read off the sheet. That is why the feeding ledger carries the agriculture column, why the penalty box is a tick and not a number, and why the multiplier tracker carries its counts instead of trusting a circled total.
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 feeding ledger 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.
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