What the Tripwire does
Every crew has a Tripwire in its vault deck alongside its twelve selected characters. Revealing it springs the alarm immediately. Every crew still inside loses its bag, while already banked Take stays intact.
The Tripwire has no useful Haul and does not need to push the meter over 18. It is a separate way for the vault to end. A deck made of quiet cards would still have to account for it, even if such a deck met all the crew-building limits.
The normal current Job uses the ramp rule. You do not choose a Tripwire-free public mode from the crew builder.
The opening protection is specific
A crew's Tripwire cannot appear among its first two cards. That does not mean those cards are safe from every danger. Ordinary Heat can still overflow a meter that the other crew has already raised.
From your third card onward, the Tripwire can be next. Its chance increases as you reveal more crew cards without seeing it. The count belongs to each crew separately, so the rival's risk depends on how far into their own deck they have gone.
How the ramp looks
These values come from the current normal ramp calculation, rounded for readability. They describe the next reveal after the stated number of crew cards have appeared and no Tripwire has fired.
| Crew cards already revealed | Tripwire chance on the next reveal |
|---|---|
| 0 or 1 | 0% |
| 2 | About 3.9% |
| 4 | About 7.4% |
| 6 | About 11.4% |
| 8 | About 17.7% |
| 10 | About 31.6% |
| 11 | About 48.8% |
You do not need to memorize that table. Its useful message is that surviving several flips changes what remains. The Tripwire is not equally likely at every position, and a long successful run does not make the next reveal safer.
This is a conditional-probability problem: the question is about the next event given what has already happened. OpenStax's probability chapter explains why card draws without replacement need that distinction. The exact ramp above is specific to Smash & Grab.
Read the total risk correctly
The game's main next-flip risk combines the Tripwire and Heat overflow. The separate Tripwire percentage explains one part of that total. Do not add it again.
For a simplified example, imagine a 10% Tripwire chance and a 25% overflow chance among ordinary cards. The combined risk is 10% plus 90% of 25%, or 32.5%. It is not 35%, because an ordinary card only appears when the Tripwire does not.
Those are teaching numbers, not a claim about a particular live vault. The game calculates your actual remaining-card situation and rounds the displayed percentage.
Use the risk to answer a score question
A four-percent chance can be unnecessary when banking already wins the final vault against a finished rival. A much larger chance may still be the only route to a comeback when banking guarantees defeat. The number describes danger; the score gives that danger a purpose.
Also remember the other crew. A successful personal reveal can hand them a turn, and their Tripwire can lose your bag too. Once they bank, that particular exposure disappears, but yours remains.
When reviewing a bust, name its cause accurately. A Tripwire loss does not prove your Heat distribution was too loud. An overflow does not mean the Tripwire caught you. Keeping those explanations separate makes the next adjustment to your crew or your exit decision much more useful.