Posting Recorded Scrabble Games

Back to Posting Recorded Scrabble Games

Here is what you need to do to post (upload) a recorded Scrabble game from your tournament.

Before the Tournament Begins

To begin, as with all forms of game recording, the staff directly involved in recording games should read the Principles of Annotation document.

• Arrange clipboards, pencils, annotation sheets and seating for each annotator
• Download a copy of Quackle
• Add a link on your tournament home page to the recorded games page that you have been assigned.
• If you have a game logo, send it to John Chew to replace the boring default logo.

During Each Game

Annotators should complete the annotation form. Emphasize to them that the most important information to record is that cannot be reconstructed at the end of the game: player racks and exchanged tiles.

At the End of Each Game

1. Obtain the annotation sheets from the annotators, enter the game data into Quackle and save it in a file.
2. Choose an ID for the game. Use letters and numbers, and if you want a hierarchical structure for your game library, use slashes (/) to indicate it.
3. Upload the Quackle .gcg game file using the ‘postgcg’ .gcg uploader script. You will need a password to do this, ask John Chew if you don’t know what your password is. If you have a Quackle analysis log file, you can upload that using the same script; if you generate the log file later, you can upload just the log file later.
4. Open the game using the ‘pgm’ .gcg editor and resave it (press the Just Save button) to validate it. Correct any reported errors in consultation with the annotators, and close the game.

In some unusual situations, you must edit the .gcg file to add additional meta-information (such as notes about player scoring errors) that Quackle cannot yet handle. You may want to always edit the file at least in order to set the game title and description to something more imaginative than ‘game n’. See the .gcg file format reference for details of the file format.

The ‘pgm’ .gcg Editor

You can use ‘pgm’ to:

• Edit posted games.
• Create posted games from scratch, if for whatever reason you don’t want to use Quackle.
• Delete posted games.

Whenever you perform any of these actions, ‘pgm’ automatically updates your event’s game index.

FTP Tasks

There are a number of tasks that you may wish to perform which for the moment need to be done using an FTP client. Games are typically stored in the "games" directory on a web server. Within the "games" directory is a file called "config.txt" which contains configuration information for the .gcg file software. It may be overridden in subdirectories by "config.txt" files places lower in the hierarchy. Each game has its own subdirectory which contains at a minimum a file called "input.gcg" (regardless of whatever the uploaded file’s name was); it may have a large number of other files too, but these are periodically purged by the .gcg viewer script.

• Editing config.txt, e.g. to change the event logo
• Uploading quackle analyses (they must be named "quackle.txt" and appear in the same directory as the related "input.gcg" file); if present they will be presented in pieces on each turn’s page.