I'm sure many of you have seen the Game of Thrones office pool floating around the internet, it caught a lot of media attention after one boss started it recently. If you haven't you can find it here: https://www.distractify.com/entertainment/2019/01/24/Cl8MmAT_K/game-of-thrones-office-pool

I decided to create my own very similar version and it has gotten a lot of attention around the office. I'm looking for advice on how to track the results in the form of an excel spreadsheet. I've been working with excel for years but I have never worked with any complex formulas I would range my experience to a Novice/Intermediate level. I'm going to lay out my thoughts before I begin designing, I would love any input on how I can make this streamline easier to track points!

My thought is to give everything its own code so that I can enter the code based on the persons selection and then do a find/replace to give it a numerical value once the results are in. I was going to begin by entering the characters across the Y axis and the participants names along the X axis assigning a value to each cell corresponding to their selection. For example, if you refer to the link above and how the characters are laid out, I would start with Jon Snow. If the person said Jon Snow would live, I would assign it code JSA if they said he would die it would be JSD. The next row would be JSW for Jon Snow White Walker or JSN for Jon Snow Not White Walker. This row would be optional so I could easily just enter 0 if they person decided to not enter anything. Once the show is concluded my plan was to figure out what codes translated to what point value and do a find/replace to substitute all of those codes for numerical values. Then I could total every column for the participants to get an overall score and determine the winner!

I think this would work, however, I can see the codes becoming complex and it could be easy to make a mistake entering the codes in the first place or when I go to swap them for numerical values entering them incorrectly. I was hoping for any input from some of our more advanced expert excel users! Do you have any suggestions on a simpler way to streamline this? Any advice is appreciated!