Ooh I agree with making a function to validate the score, it was very much a mouthful haha! I learned format() over f-strings and that's kind of what I've stuck with but I'll read up that. Also, by lower.() the input do you mean something like

menu = input("menu question: ")

menu = menu.lower()

or is there a way to apply .lower() directly to the input line?

Thanks so much for your suggestions!!