When my grandpa had his 88th birthday, my mom came up with a great idea for a party game. She took the Mexican bingo-style game and customized it for our family. It was a blast!
However, it was also time consuming to create. All of the pictures needed to be manually placed in random order to create the boards. A template from a physical loteria game was used for the image distribution on the cards. The images were put one-by-one to form the boards. I thought to myself:
There has to be a better way!
I was learning Javascript online, so I was determined to make an easy way to produce the game. I wrote a script to randomize the pictures and align them into cards that could then be printed. One of the trickiest bits was to get random groups of pictures with no repeats. Man, was that a chore, but I figured it out. I had 25 pictures in random order with no repeats. Imagine my surprise when I tried to make more than one board at a time, and I found that each board was random, but also the same. The script was using the same seed for each board. Computers just don't get this random thing, do they? So, after another whole ordeal, I was able to get multiple boards each unique and random with no repeats. Success!