Photo-opoly template - Printing photos for Photo-opoly

My wife bought a customizable board game called Photo-opoly many years ago.  Its been stored away, but we finally uncovered it and decided we wanted to give it as a gift to our niece.  Since our niece is only about 7 years old, we wanted to print out all the pictures for her.

When we opened the game to see what size pictures were needed, we found that they were an odd size, 1.25" by 1.5".  My wife suggested that I resize each picture and print them one-by-one, which sounded horrible since there are about 22 pictures needed.  Luckily (I thought) there was a card in the box that described a process for printing the pictures.

The recommended process was to go to the Ritz Camera web site, upload your photos, then choose the "PHOTO-OPOLY" template to print them.  I tried that but saw no mention of the template after uploading some pictures.  I called their customer service.  The representative told me that the template was no longer offered, but that I was the second person who had recently asked about that.  Since it sounds like other people are having the same problem, I thought I'd post my solution.

I opened up my own photo library software, Picasa, which can be downloaded for free from Google.  At first I opened the folder with my photos in it and just tried going to the "Print..." menu.  It only printed standard sizes, and the smallest was wallet size, 2.5" x 3.5".  But after playing around a little more, I found the option to print a contact sheet, which printed all my 36 pictures on one page at 1" x 1.25" each.  Looks like a full contact sheet can print 6 rows of 7 pictures, so 42 total.  The size was slightly smaller than what I thought I wanted, but the spaces to place the photos actually include a 3/16" white border, so the smaller photos just end up having some of the white border around them, which works just fine.

So to summarize, here are the steps:

1. Download Picasa, if you don't already have it.
2. Open Picasa
3. Browse to your folder that contains all of your photos
4. Go to the Folder menu and choose "Print Contact Sheet....".  That opens a Print Preview of the sheet
5. From there, you can click a "Printer Setup" button to check your printer settings.  I made sure mine was on best quality, and set the paper type to Photo Paper.
6. Print the photos

I hope that works for other people!  Merry Christmas!

Round Robin scenarios for 3 players or 4 players (or teams)

This interesting discussion came up at our backgammon club last night.  Normally, when we have a tournament, we award the winner with club points equal to the number of players who attend.  The next runner(s) up get half those points, the next gets half again, etc.  Any player with a win gets some points and players with no wins get 0 points.  This works well when we use a double elimination bracket, which we do when we have 5 or more players.

Its common though towards the end of the year that we have less players, so lately we have had a few nights of 3 or 4 players.  On those nights, we do a round robin style tournament where each person plays each person once.  The end result can have several ties and so its less clear how to award points.  So finally, I documented each scenario and how many points we will award.  Of course this can be applied to round robins in any sport with 3 or 4 teams, or other games.

3 PLAYER RESULTS

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2-0, 1-1, 0-2 : 3 points, 1.5 points, 0 points (4.5 total)

1-1, 1-1, 1-1 : 1.5 points each (4.5 total)

4 PLAYER RESULTS

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3-0, 2-1, 1-2, 0-3: 4 points, 2 points, 1 point, 0 points (7 total)

3-0, 1-2, 1-2, 1-2: No head-to-head tiebreakers, 4 points winner, 1 point for each 1-2 player (7 total)

2-1, 2-1, 2-1, 0-3: No head-to-head tiebreakers, 2.5 points for each 2-1 player (7.5 total)

2-1, 2-1, 1-2, 1-2: For each of the ties, there will be a head-to-head tiebreaker, so clear 1st through 4th placings can be determined. 4 points, 2 points, 1 point, 0.5 points (since 4th place had a win) (7.5 total)

The goal is to try to award close to the same number of total points in each case that has the same number of players.  In a 3 player round robin with no ties, the points are 3 for winner, 1.5 for second, 0 for third because that person has no wins.  That's 4.5 total points. So when 3 players have a 3-way tie, each gets 1.5 points so that the total is again 4.5.  That works out perfectly but 4 players is a little trickier.

In a 4 player round robin with no ties, winner gets 4, second gets 2, third gets 1, fourth gets 0 (no wins).  That's 7 points total.  If we were to use a double elimination bracket for 4 players, which we do sometimes if we want to finish faster, then we end with a tie for 2nd.  We don't make the winner of the consolation bracket play the loser of the main bracket, for the sake of time.  In that case, we award 4 for winner, 2 each to the two players with 1 loss each, and 0 to the person with no wins.  That's a total of 8 points.  So the goal for the 4 player round robins where there are ties is to award either 7 points total or 8 points total, or somewhere in between.