Taping, Scoring & the Hall

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Taping the shows is the game's skill challenge and the main way you build a score. This page covers the taping mini-game, how tape quality is figured, the badges you can earn, the final score, and the online leaderboard.

The taping mini-game

At each show you can tape it (or just attend for the morale boost). Taping needs a blank tape. You pick a spot to record from, which sets the difficulty and the payoff:

Crowd — easy, low quality.
Section — medium difficulty and quality (helped by your taping skill and Lot Cred).
Board (soundboard) — hardest, best quality; the only spot that can yield a legendary tape.

The mini-game is a "lock the needle in the zone" challenge over several stages. A needle sweeps back and forth; you lock it, trying to land in a green "sweet spot." Better spots have tighter zones and a faster needle, and the speed ramps up each stage for tension. Stealth paint widens the safe zone.

Each lock is graded by how close you land:

Grade	Meaning
Perfect	Dead center
Great	Very close
Good	Anywhere in the green zone
Miss	Outside the zone

Perfect and Great locks build a combo (a miss resets it); a long combo adds a quality bonus at the end. Some stages are danger stages — missing one gets you busted by security (a fine, plus Vibes and Cred hits), unless stealth gear saves you.

Tape quality

When you finish, your average accuracy becomes the tape's quality, weighted by the spot (board > section > crowd) and boosted by:

your role's taping skill and Lot Cred (section/board spots),
the Golden Ears mod (+8) and Rita's perk (+6),
tape-quality van parts (e.g. the Nakamichi deck, +10),
your combo bonus,
and "A Pinch of Something", which floors the next tape's quality at 92.

A legendary tape requires a legendary show, a board or section spot, and quality ≥ 60. It's worth a big score bonus (+60 each) and Lot Cred. Every show — taped or just attended — also grants a Vibes boost, bigger at legendary stops and increased by show-Vibes gear and Bird's perk.

Achievements (badges)

Ten badges are checked once at the end of each run against a snapshot of how it went, then saved in your browser and shown on the Badges screen and the end card:

Badge	How to earn it
The Wheels Are Rolling	Catch your first show
Ripple in Still Water	Ride your character's Peak
Good Vibes, Shared	Keep morale high enough that a van-mate pools with you
One Big Family	Finish with your whole crew still aboard
Lightning in a Bottle	Capture any tour's legendary show clean
The Archivist	Come home with 8+ tapes
Long Haul	Log 3,000+ miles
Shakedown Tycoon	End a run holding $200+
Fully Blissed	End a run with Vibes 95+
The Whole Strange Trip	Finish the tour (win)

Scoring

When a run ends, it's scored:

score = tapes×8 + shows×15 + legendaryTapes×60 + vibes + cred + cash÷5 + miles÷40

So a winning run is rewarded for attending shows, collecting tapes (and especially legendary ones), and finishing with high morale, cred, cash, and mileage.

The Hall of the Fallen (leaderboard)

Every finished run — win or lose — posts a record to the Hall of the Fallen. Records carry your name, role, outcome, cause, score, tapes, legendary count, shows, miles, day, and the tour year the run was on.

The Hall works in two modes automatically:

Shared (when the site has a database configured): everyone sees the same global leaderboard.
Local (no database): each player's runs are kept in their own browser instead. The game plays identically either way — it just falls back.

The Hall groups its ranked lists by tour year, so 1977 runs compete with 1977 runs, 1978 with 1978, and so on (each list shows the top runs by score). See Architecture for the server function and how the client picks shared-vs-local at runtime.