What’s the score?

Saturday, 29th March, 2008

For the World Cup in 2006, I ran an online game where players had to guess the scores for the matches played in the group stages. It’s a game that I’m sure goes on in many workplaces; it just gives a little extra interest to the competition, especially as Scotland failed to qualify.

We certainly had played it before at my workplace (it was Euro 2004), but it was ran by one of my workmates, all done on paper. We were each given a sheet with a list of the group stage matches, and we had to fill in our guesses at what the scores would be and then give the sheets back to him (keeping a copy obviously). As the matches were played, the guy running the game had to manually check everyone’s score sheets and award points appropriately, and then produce a new leaderboard sheet to post up on the notice boards in the building, so that everyone playing knew where they stood in the points table.

For the World Cup in 2006, I decided that I would run the game (the guy that did it in 2004 had since left), but I didn’t fancy all the work of manually checking everybody’s scores and awarding points etc. So I decided that I’d write an online version, where players could register and input their scores online, and as the results of the group stage matches were known all I had to do was enter them in an administrator interface, and my software would run through the database checking the result against everybody’s scores and awarding points automatically. I ended up with 60 registered players* and once a result was known, the leaderboard and awarded points were automatically updated in seconds.

I was quite happy with how the game went, the software was pretty stable, and the only reasonably difficult part was the scoring algorithm to award the points (there where three possible outcomes for points – 0, 1 or 3). My one problem was that the game was limited in who was able to play: in order to play, you had to pay a £2 entry fee, and this was the issue. The fact that you had to somehow get your £2 physically to me meant that you had to know me personally; or know someone that knew me personally. I’ll just say now that all of the money taken as entry fees was used as prize money – I didn’t make a penny out of running the game.

So, I’m thinking of running the game again for the Euro 2008 tournament, but I’d like to offer an online payment option, so that people could play without actually having a connection to me. I’m not sure how feasible this is, but hopefully it’s an option available to me. I’m just about to start writing the code for the game (much of it I will be able to re-use from 2006, but some of it I want to write differently), so I’ll see what options are available to me.

*There were 60 registered players on the site, but some people were registered more than once to have a better chance.