You're organising a tour around the town for a Day of Dance or as part of a Festival. You've got all the performance venues & groups ready. The tour plan needs to keep everyone happy so you want to make sure that all the groups get to meet each other.
That is where you find the problem. You're trying to work it out on paper but it seems impossible to create that perfect tour. You can't find a way to jiggle it so that all the groups see each other and every time to try to fix this it just messes up somewhere else.
Thats when the Tour Planner (or Tour Sudoku) could help. To find a tour plan for you, tell it...
There must be at least 2 Time Slots and 2 Venues to create a tour.
There will be a total of 4 groups in the tour.
It should be possible to find a Perfect Tour.
The tour has not been calculated yet.
Select the number of Time Slots, the number of Venues and pick the number of Groups at each stand.
Then click 'Calculate' to see your suggested tour.
Rather than get you to type in the names of all the groups you have coming, I've stolen some names from the chemistry set. Make a list of your own groups then write one of the chemicals next to each one. It doesn't matter which one goes where unless you want to make sure that some groups miss each other or meet more than once.
Instead of trying to second guess when your tour is going to start and when it's going to finish and then when each spot starts, I've just called the times 1, 2, 3 etc. Change them to the times you've decided for your day. Don't forget to allow for a lunch break for each group!
Each 'chemical' or group appears just once in any time slot. Provided you take the complete column, you can shuffle them around, just like shuffling cards.
In each column are the stands & the groups that share them. If the time says the same, you can swap whole stands between venues.
All the groups should be scheduled to have a lunch spot. One approach is to send everyone to lunch at the same time, putting a clean break in the days activities. This is easy to arrange and understand but the big disadvantage is that it leaves no dancing at any venue during the lunch break.
An alternative is to double the length of the lunch time slot but have half the stands with sides displaying for the first part and the other half during the second part. Now there are perfomances over the whole time but half the venues are empty.
A third way is to ask the groups performing at each stand to split it between them so one or two groups perform an extended set while the rest get their lunches before the groups swap over for the second half of the slot. This is more complex to arrange but all the venues are kept busy.
Please let me know what I need to change or fix by mailng me at