How do you play License Plate Math?



1. Introduction and needed items



This is a game I thought of while waiting in the van for my mom to do her shopping and couldn't enter the building due to mirrors. To keep myself some company, I thought of an interesting game and this is what it is. Useful for travel.

Needed items:

1 piece of paper
1 pen/pencil
1 calculator (recommended but not required)

2. How to play



This game doesn't require any kind of setup. All you need is to be out somewhere and have cars with visible license plates around. The game is simple.

First, when you find a license plate, take note of it's contents. The license plate must have three letters and three numbers arranged in any way. Upon finding a license plate that meets this criteria, multiply all the digits together. If you had, for example, JON 987, you'd multiply 9󭅋 which gives you 504 points. Next, take the letters and take note. 5 letters give you bonus points but two take away points. Here's what each letter does:

J - gain 100 points
P - lose 100 points
Q - gain 250 points
T - lose 20 points
V - gain 20 points
X - gain 200 points
Z - gain 50 points

The other letters don't do anything with your score but add zeros. In the example, JO87N9, you'd get 504 points from the number then 100 bonus points from the J giving you a total of 604, which is actually very good. Here are some other examples to aid you:

A16B4K - 24 points, no bonus
83TAZ9 - 216 points and a loss of 20 from the T giving 196
LUK777 - 343 points, no bonus
QQQ999 - the best possible giving 729 points and 750 bonus making 1479 total points
D4A4Z0 - 0 points and 50 bonus making 50 total points
PPP000 - the worst possible giving no points and a loss of 300 giving a total of -300 points

Remember, any time there's a zero, don't bother multiplying as you'll just get zero from the numbers. Judge bonus and losses by the letters. For complicated things like 647, you may use a calculator to help you.

3. Variations



There is one other variation of this game, which allows all types of license plates no matter how many letters you have and the pricipal is just the same. You can have a maximum of three numbers to multiply [the first three that are shown from left to right are multiplied and anything else is added]. This method works for other countries that don't have the 3 letters, 3 numbers format as the common one. Here are some examples using this idea:

T4528RS - 40 points from multiplication, 8 points added on from extra number and a loss of 20 from the T giving 28 total points (not too good).
17P43RX - 28 points from multiplication, 3 points from extra number, a loss of 100 from the P and a bonus of 200 from the X giving a grand total of 131 points.
VGF93PR - 27 points from multiplication, bonus of 20 from the V, and a loss of 100 from the P giving a very bad -53 points.
LUKYNO7 - 7 points without any bonuses at all - not a good score (even though it supposedly says "lucky number 7".)
999QQQQ - the best possible giving 729 points from the multiplication and 1000 bonus from the four Q's totalling 1729.
PPPPPPP - the worst possible giving a total loss of -700.

4. Multiplayer



This game hasn't been adapted for multiplayer truly, yet, however ways of doing so is to make it a race to find the highest score possible using the all-types variation. The one with the highest score after a set time is the winner (or the one with the lowest score if you prefer).

Footnotes:
There are no footnotes for this page.