THE SCORE - HACKS AND VARIANTS
Hacks are rules variants to make The Score ever more your own. Such as:
- You Don't Know Everything About Me
- You're The Best I've Ever Met At This
Example: You get dealt Driving, Traversing, Forgery and Deep Cover. You explain that you're working as a wheelman for some gangsters, and you're putting together a crew for a job. but you need an expert at parkour. You play Traversing on the player to your left, saying that's why you're recruiting them. You talk about how everyone heard about when they broke into the top of the London gherkin after dropping from a hot air balloon. That's why you need them!
- The Helicopter Stunt Stays In the Picture
- Dance to a Different Beat
This blog post has 20 different variant set ups for the deck and how they can change the tempo and the feel! - Talent Switch:
Once per game per player, if a card comes up and goes to you but you don't have that Talent, you can do a Talent Switch. This allows you to turn the card into a success, and you get to tell a story about how you do so. "I don't have Coercion, but I do have Deep Cover, so as I'm badly trying to seduce the guard he reveals he's always been on our side but it was funnier to watch me fail." "I don't have Driving but I do have Technician so I can't out run the guards but I sure as hell can hack into their car navigation systems and make them drive into buildings and off cliffs." You can even roleplay out that you expected a different situation ("I said I could fly a plane, not a helicopter!" or "Look I am a good safe cracker, but that thing is like the venus de milo of safes"). But all of this comes at a cost. Put a cross next to your ability that you use and when it DOES come up, it will have to fail instead. ("Yes, okay this IS a plane, but I lied about being able to fly a plane, sorry.") Of course it might not come up at all! It might be worth a shot! Or it might come up in the wrong moment like the very last card. Do you want to roll the dice?
Note that in Acts 2 and 4, the success is still incomplete. Players should be careful adding this rule however. It is standard play in TTRPGs to "bend" skills to suit any situation. And if you start doing that all the time, the whole central mechanic of The Score falls apart. You HAVE to use skill X at this point, that's the driving mechanic. Once per game per player is the absolute maximum and for large groups (5 or more), it should be once per game. - Too Many Down Beats In A Row
If a card comes up in Act 1 and 3 that no player has, you have to explain why, from the start, you knew you couldn't use these skills in this situation. This is really fun in Act 1, but it can be a bit tiresome getting like three or four of these cards in a row in Act 3. You want these cards to come up in Act 2 and Act 4 to raise the stakes and make it feel hard (although even then too many a row can be boring as well). You can keep Acts 2 and 4 short to help, but even then you can still get too many of these. The random nature of the card deck is part of the fun but every now and then it can make a boring movie where you just keep getting hosed or keep talking about your plans. Apart from reducing the number of negative cards in the deck as described in the rules (eg: lose two from the non Talent pile, and two from the Talent pile) or doing a Talent Switch, another idea is to use the following rule:
In Acts 1 to 4, if you ever get two negative cards in a row, then the next card becomes a success even it is a failure. Either you get a free Talent Switch or you describe how you secretly had that Talent all along, or how you can Macguyver a solution anyway. Example: "None of us has fast talk and we have no reason to be in this office. But I notice that the guard has a tattoo of Moana on their neck. I show them my tattoo of Merida from Brave. We both forget we're even heisting as we geek out about Disney fandom." or "None of us can fly a plane. But I have played Microsoft Flight Simulator thousands of times. We can work this out. It's bumpy but...we get there." Note that this doesn't apply in Act 5, and the nature of the success still depends on which Act you are in. Example: "None of us have Contacts to make us look legit here but I just ring up a vehicle hire company and tell them it's for a special occasion and Mavis is really sweet, she sends us a priority limo but it also has a banner saying HAPPY QUINCANERA because that was the first thing I could think of and as a result I have to bring my young cousin along and she'll get us into trouble pretty quickly".
As written there's no cost to this, it's just to make the game more interesting when randomness hurts but you can pay a cost if you like - just like a Talent Swap choose a Talent on your sheet, mark it with a cross and that one will now be a fail if it comes up. - Abigal/Blood Red Sky Hack
Before you remove the four cards and seed the Act cards, make sure all cards are facing the same way in the vertical plane (ie with THE SCORE on the back facing the right way up.) Then turn one card so THE SCORE is upside down. Shuffle, and remove the four cards without looking. If you reach the upside down card during the game, that's the vampire. If it's your Talent, you were the vampire! Maybe you switch sides. Maybe it helps.
Full Variants
Got a reskin of the game? We want to see it! We've even done one of our own (and we hope to do more soon) - check out: