02. January 2018

Ticket to Ride Calculator

Ticket to Ride is a simple yet surprisingly enjoyable board game, easily picked up by pre-teen family members—and your friends with wine glass firmly in hand. I’m not much of a gamer myself, so I can’t speak to the game’s relative merits or strategic weaknesses. But I’ve played it a few times now and a) scoring is by far the most complicated part of the whole exercise (so many trains, so many cards!*); and b) this problem is a good excuse to practice a little spreadsheet coding. 

The main story is that I’ve built a calculator to tally up the points after the last train has been laid. I find it handy for the purposes of the game, but the model is useful any time you want a spreadsheet to automatically inform you of ranked results (who came first, who came second, etc).
You can download a copy--built in Mac Numbers--here:
Download
Ticket to Ride Calculator
Ticket to Ride Calculator.numbers
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Download

 

The product looks like this:

 

The basics are straightforward: just a column for each player, with cells referenced to the points awarded for each train of a given length. Additional rows for each completed (and uncompleted) route follow, with the totals summed at the bottom. 
 
So far, so simple. What takes a bit of thought, however, is coding the final rankings. I find the easiest way here is to assign a rank to each score in a separate line, using the following code**:
 
(RANK, thisvalue, allvalues)
You can then turn the ranking row plus your player IDs into a cell that spits out the winner:
 
(INDEX, playerIDrange, (MATCH, 1, rankrange))
 
There’s nothing magical here, but spreadsheet coding isn’t always the most intuitive. It’s nice having a headstart on the syntax. 
 

Happy riding!

 

 

*It’s not like Settlers of Catan where you just hit 10 points and BANG, you’re done.

 

**Note that this code applies to Mac Numbers, but I find the two operate according to essentially the same rules. 

 

Tags: Methods, Spreadsheeting

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Comments: 1
  • #1

    Serg Buslovsky (Saturday, 03 August 2019 11:39)

    There's a much easier way to calculate scores now.

    Ticket To Ride Score Calculator app for Android!

    The app allows you to scan your Ticket To Ride game board using your phone's camera to calculate the game scores automatically!

    With this app you can simply take a picture of the game board using your phone's camera and it will automatically recognize player trains and calculate the scores for you!

    Here’s the app in Android Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.buslovsky.ttrsc . You can find additional information and support the project on the website: http://serg.buslovsky.com/ttrsc/ . And a video overview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_M_zGK87j0 .

    Support for iOS(Apple) device is coming soon!