Spreadsheet Jeopardy!

My girlfriend and I often watch Jeopardy! together, and we play along and keep score to make it more fun.

To avoid having to pause the show to wager, we have a house rule that “Daily Double”s are just worth twice their marked value. E.g., a D.D. on a $600 clue would be worth $1200. And we yell the answers (questions?) instead of buzzing in.

After tallying a number of games by hand, I decided to make a custom function in Google Sheets to keep score. Our scoring notation is:

• correct: first initial of first name
• incorrect: first initial of last name
• daily double: initial followed by asterisk

function score(results, level) {
  mScore = 0;
  kScore = 0;
  results[0].forEach( function(cell) {
    cell = cell.toLowerCase()
    
    if (cell.match(/.*m\*.*/)) {
      mScore += 2 * level;
    } else if (cell.match(/.*m.*/) !== null) {
      mScore += level;
    } else if (cell.match(/.*b\*.*/)) {
      mScore -= 2 * level;
    } else if (cell.match(/.*b.*/)) {
      mScore -= level;
    }
    
    if (cell.match(/.*k\*.*/)) {
      kScore += 2 * level;
    } else if (cell.match(/.*k.*/)) {
      kScore += level;
    } else if (cell.match(/.*c\*.*/)) {
      kScore -= 2 * level;
    } else if (cell.match(/.*c.*/)) {
      kScore -= level;
    }
    
  })
  return [[mScore, kScore]];
}

(Yes, I’m aware this could be refactored)

It just occurred to me that I could probably modify this function to gift me a stray hundred dollars every now and then. She probably wouldn’t notice… 😈