I think leeway is fine where a number is located in a spot where multiple collections could legitimately be cited but only one is being asked for (for instance, the marker for Kirkley Hall is also in the right spot for Northumberland County Zoo) but I agree that allowing two collections which *both* have numbers and are relatively-close but also definitively-apart from one another (for instance, the South Lakes and LWO example) to be swapped is indeed a bit pointless No, @Coelacanth18 gave both half-and-full marks for close answers depending on the exact answers, per his above summing-up remarks......
As @TeaLovingDave has said some of the numbers cover more than one zoo, so although some of the answers were not what was being asked for, the answers given could not be counted as wrong. Hence why I got 73 exact, but 4 more full points including the Northumberland example above
Thank you all for sharing your thoughts and critiques Before I explain my reasoning and address them, I'll clear something up real quick: You are right; Devon is what I meant to say there. A simple typo, I assure you! Now, it seems that generally there is a questioning of my leniency in giving credit to answers that were not technically correct and for which there was a noticeable distance between the two. I anticipated this; I knew when creating this game I would run the risk of either being too stringent in my scoring or being too lenient. While I would have rather avoided either end of the spectrum, I made a conscious choice that if I *did* lean too much in one direction, being too lenient would be that direction. My reasoning for that is this: I don't have a high degree of familiarity with UK geography, the zoos on the islands, or the practical distance between them - something I was straightforward about when I initiated this game. Therefore, I wanted to avoid a scenario in which I unfairly denied participants points for collections that were actually closer in distance than is apparent to me on the map. For what it's worth, as an American I also find many of these distances comparatively short anyway therefore, my idea of what is "close" and what is "distinctly not close" may be different than for the British members. To clarify my overall scoring: I generally followed this guideline: - Full credit for correct bubble or fairly close bubble; - Half credit for correct county but not correct area; - No credit for wrong county or blank answer I can understand how giving partial credit only for putting it in the right county, or full credit for putting it in the right general area, can seem like it was too generous to the point of wondering why there were even bubbles at all. What I will say is that the results would have looked largely the same either way; the same person would have won, the rest would have been further back and still closely packed together, and the "notes and observations" I made would still largely hold true. In retrospect, the best thing to do would have been to confer with one or two members familiar with UK zoos and get input/feedback on where to place things and how to score them before the game started. However, as I did not know any members at the time who fit that bill and knew that they were not going to otherwise participate, I went ahead solo. If I ever run this game again in a country besides the US, I will make sure to take this step.
