A printable Twilight Struggle influence log lives or dies on the one record nobody keeps: which side controls what, country by country, in the region whose scoring card just landed, because a scoring card cannot be held. Hold one past the end of your turn and you lose the game, so the table has to score instantly from the map as it stands, and the map at that moment is a scatter of influence markers across six regions, with nobody sure whether that one marker in Panama counts as control or just influence, or whether Cuba counts once or twice.
The argument is always about the scoring level, not the map. Everyone at the table can see the markers; what they disagree about is what the markers add up to. Presence means controlling at least one country in the region. Domination means controlling more countries than your opponent and more battleground countries than your opponent, including at least one battleground and one non-battleground country. Control means controlling more countries than your opponent and every battleground country in the region. On top of the level, each side scores 1 extra victory point per battleground country it controls in the region, and 1 extra per controlled country adjacent to the enemy superpower, and then the net difference moves the shared victory point track.
The worked scoring line is the part buyers actually check before they trust the sheet. Take a Central America scoring card played when the USSR controls Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, while the United States controls Guatemala and has only 1 influence in Panama, which is not control. The USSR scores domination of Central America for 3 points, plus 1 for controlling the battleground Cuba, plus 1 because Cuba is adjacent to the United States, for 5 points. The United States scores 1 point for presence, having Guatemala. The line reads: USSR 5, United States 1, a net of 4 victory points to the USSR, and every number on the line can be checked against the map and the battleground list.
The counterfactuals are what make the log worth printing rather than scribbling. If Cuba flipped to the United States, the United States would control Cuba and Guatemala against the USSR's Haiti and Dominican Republic, and with Cuba as its battleground it would score presence 1, plus 1 for the battleground, plus 1 for adjacency, for 3 points, while the USSR would score only 1 for presence, a net of 2 to the United States — a 6-point swing from the original net of 4 to the USSR, decided by a single country that scores three times over. And if either player had simply held the scoring card instead of playing it, there would be no argument at all, because holding a scoring card past the end of your turn loses the game, which is why the sheet records which scoring cards have been played each turn as well as the influence that produced the score.
That is why the sheet sells as a download rather than as a blank victory point track. A blank track records where the marker ends up; a worked influence log records the decision the table actually argued about, with each country's control, its battleground flag, and its adjacency flag all on the same line, so the scoring level and the bonuses fall out of the sheet instead of out of a twenty-minute recount. Print it, fill one line per region per scoring, and the next time someone says Panama counts as control, the answer is on the paper, not in anyone's memory.
This is an unofficial fan-made log sheet, not affiliated with or endorsed by GMT Games. Twilight Struggle is a two-player card-driven game of the Cold War, 1945-1989.
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