JennyScript

I love playing board games, so I was really excited to receive a copy of Rail Baron as a gift. Rail Baron is a classic game that has been out of print a long time and thus is a bit hard to find. It’s a long game which isn’t helped by the fact that there’s a huge chart in tiny writing which you use to find out how much money you make for going between two cities. This is the most unenjoyable part of the game. So of course I had to write a little script to automate it. This was also a great opportunity to do something useful with jQuery as I learn it. If you’re a jQuery user, I’d love some feedback on any beginner mistakes I’ve made.

Rail Baron payout finder

I found the data in an excel file here. Then I had to save it as a csv. Then I converted that to json. Then I did some manual clean up. It was a lot faster than typing it all in by hand though!

What next? I’d like to dabble with writing iPhone apps and this seems like a fun first app for that. The second least enjoyable aspect of playing the game is rolling for destinations. It would be fun to just shake the iPhone and it’ll choose a city for you and tell you how much money the route is worth. The players can just concentrate on the more enjoyable strategic parts of the game.