Fascinating logarithms

Let's all put thoughts of zombies from our minds (apart from the lovely zombie lady in Incan Gold) as settle down with some numbers. There are only a few weeks left until the end of the season, especially since this year Games Night has been double booked with Christmas Day, since both fall on a Tuesday. And if that wasn't bad enough, New Year's Day also falls on a Tuesday! What are the chances of that?

As for the Q-system, I made a mistake in last season's spreadsheet. It didn't change the order, but it did squash everyone together in terms of points ratio. This season, the Q-System is back to its cruel best. Adam has a considerable lead in terms of points and Paul's performance in coming first and third in two six-player games puts him in first on Points Ratio.

Then I typed out the Olympic-style medal chart and it was all quite nice, but something was missing. It looked tired, old... uninteresting. And it had, after all, been over a year since I'd messed around with the scoring system so I decided to create a football-style division with three points for gold, two for silver, one for bronze and nothing for anything less.

But it needed Goals For and Against. The explanation for how I invented this new system is a bit long and tedious (see below if you must know), but for now let us admire the new creation and salute Hannah and Adam on their glorious victories (so far).

About the goals...

I put my thinking cap on and dug out Adam's old binary system (which converts everyone's scores onto a scale between 1 (winner) and 0 (last place). I then mucked about with multipliers and eventually stumbled on quite a nice system using logarithms. I like this because if someone wins by a large margin, it greatly rewards them, while giving those in the other places almost nothing.

Fore example, in the recent trouncing of us by Adam in Game Of Thrones,

1. Adam, 7 buildings
2. Andrew, 3 buildings, 3 supplies, 1 power token
3. Anja, 3 buildings, 3 supplies, 0 power tokens, highest influence
4. Steve, 3 buildings, 3 supplies, 0 power tokens, not as much influence
5. Sam, 3 buildings, 2 supplies

By this system Adam scored 6 goals, me and Anja scored two, Steve got one and Sam scored no goals at all.

I'll be honest, I'm not sure how it works, really. I was just trying things at random when I found one that looked right.

You can download the spreadsheet here.