How to win Sports Under 150

Sports Under 150 deals you ten nations, one flag at a time, and gives you ten sports. Each nation goes into one sport, and its world ranking in that sport is added to your total. Every sport gets used once. Finish under 150 and you win.

It looks like a geography quiz, but it’s really a budgeting game. Here’s how to spend the budget well.

Do the math on the budget

You have 149 points to spread over ten nations. That’s an average of about 15 each, so you need most of your nations in or near the top 15 of their sport.

Any nation that’s unranked in a sport, or ranked worse than 100th, scores 100 there. One of those leaves 49 points for the other nine nations, about 5 each. That’s nearly impossible. So the first rule is simple: avoid the 100s. Two of them and the day is over.

Some sports are much shallower than others

Not every sport has a deep ranking. Here’s how many nations are ranked inside the top 100 of each sport in the game:

Gymnastics has only 17 ranked nations. Tennis and badminton, which use a nation’s best individual player, are thin too. Soccer and volleyball are the opposite: almost every nation you’ll be dealt has some ranking there.

That gives you two kinds of slots. Deep sports (soccer, volleyball, basketball, rugby) are safe landing spots for an average nation. Shallow sports (gymnastics, badminton, tennis, hockey) can only be filled cheaply by a handful of nations, so they’re the ones that end up costing 100 if you aren’t careful.

Protect the shallow sports

When a nation ranked in a shallow sport shows up, think hard before you put it anywhere else. Japan, for example, is ranked 1st in gymnastics and 1st in baseball. Putting Japan in baseball looks perfect, but other nations can fill baseball. Very few can fill gymnastics.

Ask this every turn: if I use this sport now, who else could fill it later? If the answer is “lots of nations”, it’s fine to use it. If it’s “almost nobody”, and this nation is good somewhere else, save it.

One-sport nations get their sport

Some nations are elite at one thing and unranked at most others. Fiji is 9th in rugby and 60th or worse everywhere else. New Zealand is 2nd in rugby and 2nd in cricket. When one of these specialists shows up, give it its sport. There’s no clever alternative.

If two specialists want the same sport, the one with the worse fallback should get it.

All-rounders are your flexible pieces

At the other end are the nations that are good at everything. The United States and Canada are each in the top 10 of eight of the ten sports. These nations are the most valuable cards in the game, not because of any one ranking but because they can fill whatever hole is left.

If an all-rounder comes early, it can be smart to put it in the shallowest sport still open, where you’d struggle to find anyone else. Let the specialists that follow take the deeper sports they’re suited to.

Where to put a bad nation

Sometimes you’ll get a flag that’s weak everywhere. Look for its least-bad deep sport first, since a rank of 60 in volleyball is much better than a 100 in gymnastics. If it really has nothing, and you have to take a big number, take it in the sport you were least likely to fill well anyway. That’s usually a shallow sport that nobody left in the deck is likely to rank in.

Every board can be won

A solver checks every daily board, so there’s always a way to finish under 150. If the deal looks hopeless, it isn’t. It usually means one of the nations you’ve already seen is ranked somewhere you didn’t expect.

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