Games

Our semi-regular pub quiz ends with the jackpot round - one team competes in a luck-driven “higher/lower” card game to win a jackpot (currently c.£500), and if they lose, some more money is added to the jackpot for the following week. I’d never seen anyone win the jackpot - so was curious to work out what the chances actually are and what the optimal strategy (to the extent that there is strategy beyond the obvious) is.

The cards are dealt without replacing them in the deck, so the probabilities vary during the game, making it trickier to explicitly calculate the probability of winning. But it is relatively simple to estimate using Monte Carlo simulation - running multiple simulated games, counting the wins, and using that to estimate the win probabilities when applying various strategies.

“Scrabble isn’t a word game. It’s an area-control game with 150,000 rules to define legal placement for your resources. Some of those rules have mnemonics in the form of words you know.”

The origin of this fair description of Scrabble is traced in a recent Hacker News discussion of the game, prompted by Oliver Roeder’s 2022 article On the Insanity of Being a Scrabble Enthusiast.

Over the last couple of years I have been introduced to two card games with a similar theme - co-operating to play numbered cards in an increasing sequence - but with very different approaches. This article considers The Mind, a game of group rapport and intuition, where players must sense the right moment to play their cards. Hanabi, described in Part 1 of this series, is a game of deduction.

Over the last couple of years I have been introduced to two card games with a similar theme - co-operating to play numbered cards in an increasing sequence - but with very different approaches. Hanabi, described in this article (Part 1), is a game of deduction - it echoes classic puzzles featuring multiple logicians reasoning not only about what they know themselves, but what they can deduce about what the others know based on what they say or do. The Mind, on the other hand, is a game of group rapport and intuition, and will be discussed in Part 2 of this article.

Introduced to Horde Chess, a chess variant where Black plays as normal against a White side with 36 pawns, handily available to play online at lichess.org. (White wins by checkmate, Black wins by capturing all the White pieces.)

I played a bit of chess at school, up in the eaves of the maths department, but hadn’t touched it in years before recently installing the Droidfish app (powered by the Stockfish chess engine) on my phone. Trial and error - and a bit of reading to refresh rusty tactical basics - soon discovered the (still embarrassingly low) percentage strength setting to result in a fair-ish game rather than a wipeout.

But I was puzzled to find that, on occasions when I ended up in a hopefully-winning position in the endgame, Droidfish started making arbitrary, pointless moves rather than trying to make life difficult. (Puzzled, but amused when it means I can effortlessly get a bunch of pawns promoted and checkmate with three queens or the like :smile: )

Imagine signing up, along with 9 friends, to play a game which will could take 10 years to complete — and those years dealing with quirky, complex rules and finicky calculations. That is what Richard Berg’s 1979 WWII board wargame published by SPI, “The Campaign for North Africa: The Desert War 1940–43”, demands — as I learned from Luke Winkie’s article The Notorious Board Game That Takes 1,500 Hours To Complete.