# The Night Desk

> A night-editor scheduling game: fill every section of tomorrow's paper using the least column inches.

You run the night desk at a city paper. The wire never stops, the page has four sections to fill, and every story you run costs column inches you don't get back. The wire services sell column inches. The night editor's job is to not get sold. Simple to play, hard to play well.

## How it's scored

After each night, the game computes the best edition that was possible for the exact stories that came over the wire. The perfect edition, found by exhaustive search with full hindsight. Your score is how close your column inches came to that ceiling. 100% means you put out a night that couldn't have been edited better.

The wire is seeded and every decision is replayable, so scores are verifiable. That is what ranked play below is built on. A second leaderboard, for programs written to play the game, is still to come.

## Ranked nights

A ranked night is built exactly like a casual one. Same dealer, same wire, same rules. The difference is where it runs. The seed stays on the server and never reaches your browser, so the night cannot be read ahead or replayed until it comes out right. Each decision is committed before the next story is dealt, and the server refuses anything that does not continue the line you actually played.

Your standing is the average of your last five nights. A night you fail counts as a zero and still takes a slot, which is the whole cost of a bad night. One brilliant night will not carry you and it will not be forgotten either. It keeps mattering for four more.

Standings: [the Night Desk leaderboard](https://noahmitchem.com/leaderboard.md)

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