Scheduling fictional fights

[tangaroa]

My Smash fanfic-in-progress has a schedule.

I have given myself some guidelines in designing this:

• Some fights will happen at certain weeks in the story, and this is unavoidable. The others can be shuffled.
• Four fighters are going to end the season at 4-2, 5-1, or 6-0 and make the finals.
• Everyone else will end the season at 3-3 or worse.
• Certain fighters are going to be 0-2 at week 3 so there can be side stories about their struggles.
• Fighters on the same team do not fight each other.
• Nobody should fight more than two fighters from any other team. This can be fudged in the offscreen fights.
• The tournament is larger than the named characters, so fighters can fight "someone else".

I have created a logic puzzle. It's like Sudoku.

So, after a short time I now have a full schedule for all characters. One of them ends up at 4-2 instead of 5-1, and I cheated by having Alex fight "Other" offstage on two different weeks, but it will work. It does not have to be logically perfect, it only needs to carry the story. I was only trying to fit some of the fights to the formal schedule, but I had to schedule more and more of them to make it work.