An Analysis of Monopoly, or Why Monopoly is Worse than Poker

The game of Monopoly (I am considering the four player game played without house rules) is played over four phases that are roughly distinct.

• In the first phase, players are randomly given properties by the roll of the dice. It is unusual that you should not buy a property on which you land, so everyone generally buys everything they land on. (It's possible that, at some point, your opponents have too little money, in which case it may be worth auctioning the property off and buying it for less (just enough to outbid your opponents); I suspect that this is a rare occurrence.)
• In the second phase, players trade properties in order to accumulate monopolies. It is unusual that you receive a monopoly from the first phase through random dice rolling (in a four player game); if you do, you already have a huge advantage. Trading takes some skill, but not a whole lot of skill if you know the actual values and expected ROI of the monopolies. Still, the negotiation can give you a leg up in the next phases.
• In the third phase, players build houses and hotels on their monopolies. It is known that the the sweet spot is three houses, both because of the large rent leap from two to three houses and because of the limitation of houses available to build during the game. The skill in this phase is in managing your cash flow; if you have a row of opponent properties in front of you, you must keep your cash to avoid mortgaging properties. There is a bit of skill in the odds calculation here, but not much.
• In the last phase of the game, players roll the dice repeatedly until all players but one are eliminated from the game. There are - essentially - no interesting decisions in this phase.

With any set of players who are not total morons, who have a rudimentary understanding of probability, and who know the relative property values on the board, there is little chance that the players' holdings will vary much in value by the time the fourth phase is entered. One player's properties might be landed on 16.2% of the time, while another player's only 12.8% of the time. The first player is in a better position. And I suspect that both players had some fun during the negotiations and resource management up to this point. But here's where the problem starts.

In poker, you may have a hand that wins 16.2% of the time and your opponent a hand that wins 12.8% of the time. There is much more left to the game. You don't know what your opponent holds in his hand. You're not playing only against the system, for which the percentage is known, you're also playing against your opponent. You have to play not only the odds of your hand and what you might draw, but also the style of your opponent, a never-ending continuous assessment that continues to challenge right up until the cards are revealed. He might bluff. He might fold. He might call or raise. You only have clues as to the value in his hand, and therefore how to evaluate your own. The power of the cards plays only one part of the game.

Compare this to Monopoly. When the fourth phase is reached, players simply roll and roll and roll until one of them wins. There is nothing left to play; all information is open, there are no more properties or houses to buy, no more resource management, no hidden values to assess. As long as the percentages are close, any property on which you have three houses or more is going to kill or nearly kill you if you land on it. Additional damage is not that relevant. If you have only $50, you are just as dead landing on a property that costs $600 as one that costs $900 or $75.

In Monopoly, the percentages for win/loss in phase four are going to be a few points: 12% vs 16% or something like that. First one to roll badly loses.

Gamewise, there is no real favorite, no unexpected winner or loser, no underdog. On any particular roll, however, the odds will vary wildly. You might be entering at a long stretch of properties owned by an opponent. On this particular roll, your odds of surviving might be 60 to 12.5, in which case survival is a win for the underdog. This is the thrill of gambling; however it is the "low" sort of gambling that allows no choices, not even on whom or how much to bet. The game state is set, you're 100% in and you simply await the outcome. You can't fold and save your money for the next game, or bluff your opponent into not charging rent. You can't bet on another player.

That's why Monopoly ultimately fails as an interesting game, when compared to other luck heavy games such as poker.

Fun Board Games to Enhance Students' Learning Experiences

The following is a guest post from Brian Jenkins

Playing board games is a great way for students to learn because children retain more information when they're having fun. Games get children motivated. Math and spelling won't induce boredom when they're integrated into fun games. By playing board games, children enhance their logic and reasoning skills, learn to solve problems, and gain skills in strategic thinking.

Kids also enhance their social skills while playing board games. They learn about following rules, taking turns, fairness, and how to graciously win and loose. Of course, gracious losing might kids some extra time to get the hang of!

Let's take a look at some of the best board games for young students:

Dino Math Tracks Place Value Game

This game has received the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Gold Seal which is given to toys that enrich the lives of children. Players race around the game board with a pack of prehistoric pals. The game emphasizes the mathematical concept of place value and is a fun way for young students to learn addition and subtraction. The game includes multiple levels of play for children of different ages and abilities.

UPWORDS

UPWORDS is similar to Scrabble and exercises the same skills. However, it is easier to make words and score points because kids can stack onto existing words. Therefore, it's a better choice than Scrabble for younger kids. Also, the scoring system is simplified.

Primary Pups

This fun game integrates 1st through 3rd grade curricula. Players answer multiple choice questions from the following subject areas: Math, science, history, grammar, health, and geography. Students advance their puppies along the game board by correctly answering questions.

Flip 4

Flip 4 is designed for ages 8 to 12. It's a strategy game that teaches math and logical thinking and planning. Kids role the dice and then add, subtract, or multiply to land on board squares. Students try to strategically flip their opponents out of the game. The game received an Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Gold Award, a Dr. Toy Top 10 Game Award, and an iParenting Media Award.

Equate

This game is a mathematical version of Scrabble. Kids use tiles to make horizontal or vertical math equations. In addition to teaching kids how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, the game requires kids to think strategically and creatively. Equate received a Parent's Choice Recommended Award, a Games Magazine Best Game award, and a Dr. Toy 100 Best Children's product award.

Word Pirates

It takes spelling and strategy skills to win this game. Kids try to be the fist player to reach the treasure by building a path of words and bridges. The game is designed for ages six and up and received a Creative Child Magazine Preferred Choice Award.

Have Kids Create Their Own Board Games

Besides playing with fun, educational games made by adults, let students have the opportunity to make their own games. Give them criteria to meet and allow them to use their creativity to develop a game. This is a great challenge for students!

Board games are a great way to break up the monotony of everyday classroom instruction. Fun and education is always a great combination!

Brian Jenkins writes feature articles, including pieces that offer career information for elementary school teachers, about a variety of different education and career topics for BrainTrack.com.

The opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the blog owner's.

Guest post: 7 Tips For Improving Your Chess Game

The following is a guest post:

Chess is not your typical board game, as not much is left to chance except maybe when your opponent "chances" to do something stupid. Becoming a skilled player involves an ability to devise a strategy (with adequate back-up plans) and some capacity for anticipating your opponent's next moves. The more you play and study the tactics of skilled players, the better you will become at developing your own unique strategies. A few best practices, however, are well-known and can be applied by any amateur player who wishes to take steps to improve their game.

1.) Don't underestimate the power of your pawns. These little guys are a great protective measure for your king, and work great in chains for organizing an attack. However, they're close to worthless when they're isolated from each other on the board or if a chain of them is blocking powerful players, like your bishops and rooks. It's usually a good practice to build inverted V chains of pawns rather than going for V-shaped chains, which are weaker. Try to maintain the pawns in the middle of the board, while remembering to open up chains for your power players.

2.) Get your knights in the middle when the board is still crowded so they can wreak more havoc against your opponent. Too many novice players leave their knights close to the sidelines where they have a more limited range of motion from which to make their L-shaped attack.

3.) Remember that bishops and rooks are much more useful in an endgame scenario than a knight or a pawn because they can cross vast distances if need be on the open board. If you're forced to sacrifice a knight or a bishop early into a game, sacrifice a knight.

4.) Don't take the queen too far out too soon. She may pack a punch, but she's also your most valuable asset.

5.) Castle your king early. This will help protect you from an early checkmate.

6.) Attack invisibly. In other words, your opponent is more likely to anticipate an attack from the piece you move. Attacking invisibly often means you move a piece merely to free up another of your pieces to attack on the next move. Your opponent is less likely to organize a defense for the invisible attack and you are more likely to capture the piece you're after.

7.) Sometimes offense is the best defense. When you're cornered and a piece of yours is about to be taken, see if you can position yourself to capture a more valuable piece from your opponent. Your opponent will then face the decision of whether to rescue his or her own piece or proceed to take your piece as originally planned.

This guest post is contributed by Angelita Williams, who writes on the topics of college courses. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: angelita.williams7 @gmail.com.

The Myth of Multiple Paths to Victory

Gamers value board games that provide multiple paths to victory. A game with multiple paths to victory is one where more than one strategy may be successfully used during a game.

A game with a single path to victory is one in which a single strategy dominates. For instance, ....

Well, like ....

Um ....

Hmmm.

I just went through the 265 games that I have rated on the Geek and couldn't find a single example. All I could find were games where there were no choices at all, such as Candyland.

In even the simplest games, such as Chinese Checkers, Sorry, or Connect Four, players generally have a choice between aggressive and defensive play styles, or some combination of both. You can play safely, trying to minimize the possibility of being hit by your opponent, or aggressively try to hit your opponent. Or, you can ignore your opponent altogether.

Whether victory is decided by the most points, most money, first player to reach the end, or last player remaining, the types of tactics in which you engage are determined by the strategic options you employ: slow, cautious, and steady, fast and risky, or aggressive and interfering.

In contrast, the games touted as having multiple paths to victory actually give less strategic options.

Why? Because no one can interfere with your gaining points. Someone can expend resources to block you off from one avenue, but you have a dozen other avenues still open. Interaction becomes far less important, except for limited short term annoyances that you are able to do while maximizing your gain, anyway.

The game becomes, perforce, more tactical, and less strategic, which I admit is highly counter-intuitive. The game becomes less interactive and more like mutual solitaire.

For example, when the winner of the game is the one with the most points, and the only way to get points is to gain doohickeys, your options are to gain the doohickeys recklessly, gain them cautiously, work to prevent your opponent from doing so, or some combination.

In contrast, when you can gain points either by a) gaining doohickeys, b) gaining sets, c) retaining money, d) scoring interim positions, or e) being first to do hoozitz in any of seven territories, your strategic options decline.

You can either maximize your points each round by hill climbing, or plan to maximize your points over several rounds by investing and then reaping. And that's it, really.

If you extol games with "multiple paths to victory", you are really extolling games with more tactics and less strategy. More calculation and less interaction. More planning and less instinct.

Which is great, if that's what you like.

Game News

First of all, lay off Britney Spears already, please. It was funny when she was a dope, and titillating when she showed her privates, but making fun of someone suffering from a mental breakdown is inexcusable. I mention this because of another jab at her in the form of a fake board game Britopoly, which is simply mean, not funny.

Lost level pleads with game designers to make their in-game penalties something that creates more of a challenge, and not something that simply makes the game less fun to play.

Gilad Yarnitzky, a fellow Israeli board gamer, is doing a series on board gaming in Israel on Board Game News. Speaking of Board Game News, Eric Martin, the new editor of Board Game News, has just opened up free guest membership to those who want to comment on the site. BGN is the second best stop for board games on the Internet, after Board Game Geek.

The Wall Street Journal talks about Hasbro's openness to new board games, but I don't have registration access to the site. If anyone can send me the complete article, I'd be much obliged. Update: here it is in full. (via Eric)

d21 talks about the down side of Settlers becoming a huge success if it moves to XBox, since the lure of monetary gain might take over the fledgling board game design world.

The Human Side of Computer Games Dept

Jeff Orkin is hosting an open game development process, to see what happens if games are designed from the bottom up according to what players actually wish to do, in The Restaurant Game.

David Sirlin describes how to design games that are both fun to play and also accomplish useful things as a side effect.

Your Assistance is Required Dept

Nigeria is trying to up its chess performance at the next Africa Games, and is getting a boost from a partnership with grandmaster of England, Nigel Short. Nigel Short is rumored to have responded to an email from one of their players asking him to assist in winning Ten Milion Chess Games (10,000,000) if he deposits a mere Seven Hundred and Fifty chess games into the Nigerian chess player's track record.

Yehuda

Chess as a Euro-game

Hive

Friday evening we went to Nadine's house. Nadine had made a homemade version of the game Hive, because she doesn't like the bugs on the game's pieces.

So instead of beetles and crickets, etc, she had dogs, cats, horses, sheep, and a barn (the queen bee).

We played two games, switching sides, and I won both times. Nadine isn't actually a big fan of abstract games, so I'm not sure why she made it.

Chess

I haven't played chess in a number of years. Our non-playing guest after lunch said that he was willing to play a game.

Now, when you come back to chess after playing hundreds of Euro-games, you approach the game quite differently. Instead of seeing the game of chess as "chess", which has its own rules, patterns, and history, you approach the game like you approach any other tactical, area-control game.

Actually, not area-control. I approached the game as a resource game. Each turn I had one action resource, and I had sixteen meeples to play with, each with its own movement actions. The game ends when someone is about to lose their king meeple.

So my approach to the game was from an action point point-of-view. I figured that whenever I had more meeples, and more available actions from which to choose, then I was probably winning. And that meant that I could exchange pieces so long as I kept the upper-hand. Furthermore, when my opponent had less actions available, they were more likely to make bad ones.

That's how I played, and given that my opponent wasn't very strong, it worked quite well. After gaining a few pawns advantage, I swapped at every opportunity. When I couldn't swap, I worked to limit the number of possible moves that my opponent could make, regardless of whether the position was more or less helpful to me.

In the end, I could see his moves to a reasonable depth because he had few available options, so I was easily able to set up more piece swaps.

Once we got to the end game, I was ahead about five pawns and a rook, and then it was simply a matter of forcing his king into a corner while ensuring he couldn't snatch any of my pieces by mistake. A simple checkmate ensued.

(Speaking of chess as a Euro-game, Trabsact continues to put out interesting abstract game variations, by the way, including this one on Alternating Weapon Chess.)

Puerto Rico

At the end of the day, Nadine stuck around after Rachel's shiur on Job and we played a game of Puerto Rico. This time I was first, Rachel second, and Nadine third. Nadine and I discussed alternative starting plantations for three player, such as indigo-sugar-indigo, corn-sugar-indigo, and so on, without coming to any definitive conclusions. The truth is, taking out the Small Market is already a big step toward a solution, but third player still wins often.

Not this time, as between Rachel and I both taking Harbor, the VP supply drained very quickly. Nadine had the only big building, but she wasn't even able to man it.

Nadine was pumping out huge amounts of corn and tobacco, but we kept denying her boat space. I had a coffee monopoly, but the trading house emptied only once during the entire game. So I locked a boat, instead. Rachel still managed to trump me, once again with good Hospice play, taking a few corns and quarries when necessary, and then ending the game tied for me in shipping points (31 each), and 1 point ahead in building points. She won 44 to 43, while Nadine had 32 or so.


Monopoly Madness is an event to benefit the British Columbia Paraplegic Association and Boys & Girls Club Services of Greater Victoria. Saturday, February 24, 2007 at the Victoria Conference Centre, Canada.

Hasbro finally announced that it would be releasing various board games to play online on RealNetworks, including Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly, Game of Life, and Yahtzee.

Board Game News points us to the world record for Carcassonne playing - 42 hours and 48 minutes - with pictures.

And Slashdot informs us that eBay is delisting all virtual goods from Second Life, due to ownership clarification issues. Which may have an economic impact. On Second Life. Or eBay. Not sure which.

Yehuda

GameDaily: Video Games vs Board Games

Article here.

My response:

Regarding the article "Board Games Vs. Video Games" by Robert Workman.

Robert compared modern video games to fifty year old board games. The most recent game he assessed was Trivial Pursuit, more than twenty five years old.

Would he so easily compare modern board games to twenty five or fifty year old video games?

Robert should learn that board games have made major strides in modern years. Without even a passing knowledge of Eurogames, one can simply not take his article seriously.

As far as points go, here is my take:

Strategy: The strategy of video games lasts, maximum, six months. The strategy consists almost entirely of "learn what works and then do that". Compare this to board games such as Chess or Go (older games) or Puerto Rico or Age of Steam (modern games), and there is simply no comparison. I will still be playing the same board games for ten years. You won't be playing the same video game in ten years.

Multiplayer: I will concede multi-player, but bear in mind that several hundred people can easily enjoy simultaneous Bridge games.

Technology: This is a rather silly comparison, considering the definitions of the two items you are comparing. In any case, Phillip's Entertaible, and several other products, are going to change this soon.

Price: 'nuff said.

Set-up: You actually gave this one up too easily. Video games have are hard to set up initially, but afterwards are not generally too hard. However, some board games can take quite a while to set up.

Concept/Imagination: Sorry, you really blew this one. Modern Eurogames are nothing but highly imaginative, each game being completely different in mechanics and skills. In Princes of Florence, you use auctions to attract artisans to produce great works of art in your kingdom. In El Grande, you try to curry favor with the traveling king in medieval Spain. Comparing video games to Monopoly is just silly. On the other hand, video games are endless series of the same games, over and over, where the only thing that changes is the graphics and specific numbers.

Cross-over appeal: no complaints.

You forgot a whole bunch of other issues:

Social interaction
Educational
Portable
Obsolescence
Modifiable
Variants
Compatibility
Easy to make

And so on.

Yehuda

P. S. Another mainstream article about card playing. This one would be unremarkable, except that it's a grandfather and he extols the creation of game variants. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Strategic Games: Computers vs Humans

This post is a merging of two previous discussions. One is the familiar tactics versus strategy discussion, and the other is the computer versus human opponent's discussion. The point of the article is to compare the challenge of strategy versus a computer with that of strategy versus a human.

In a previous article about strategy versus tactics, I wrote that strategy is essentially the human aspect of game theory. That doesn't make any sense out of context, so I will recreate the context here.

Strategy and Tactics: Definitions

The first definitions of strategy and tactics are that strategy is the "grand view" of how you will be achieving your goal, and tactics are the specific steps taken to implement a strategy. For instance, if the goal is to annihilate an army, one strategy is to attack their left flank, and the tactics to implement this strategy are to move under cover, take the high ground, and use burst fire on the artillery on the left flank, followed by infantry.

A contrary view defines tactics and strategy as functionally identical. In this view, a strategy is only a grander type of a tactic. In other words, let's say that the strategy is "attack the left flank", and the tactics are to "move here", "achieve cover", and "fire your weapons".

These tactics can also be broken down into further components. "Move here" also requires tactical decisions about how to move, what to move, and so on. And the strategy is only part of a larger strategy "annihilate the army", which breaks down into "aerial bombardment, "feint forward attack", "attack the left flank".

So, the argument goes, there is no real division between strategy and tactics.

Another view is that strategy is what you do when you don't know what the correct tactics are. For instance, as long as Chess is unsolved, your strategy is to control the center or pin pieces. If chess becomes solved, then every act is either better or worse for achieving your goal of winning, so all acts devolve into better or worse tactical moves.

The next view is that strategy gives positional advantage without changing other metrics, while tactics achieves a measurable movement towards your goal. For instance, if your goal is to kill 100 units, a strategic move is one that does not kill or weaken any units, but that puts your guns into a positions that makes killing easier. A tactical move is one that kills or weakens at least 1 unit.

While these views have their differences, they overlap in some senses.

Strategy as a Human Element

Let's assume that a better strategy offers opportunities for more effective tactics, either through reduced resource expenditure, more available tactical options, or more effective progression towards your goal.

My interest is in describing what to do when you are faced with two relatively equal strategic options. Even if you know exactly what tactical superiority can be achieved, your decision as to which strategy to implement depends on non-measurable quantities.

One strategy might be the correct move to exploit a weakness of your specific opponent, which may induce him to make a mistake that only he would make. Actually, this may be measurable through previous experience with your opponent, or by having studied him.

Or, one strategy may simply have less variables associated with it. Familiarity with a strategy can make you more comfortable in implementing it. Actually, this too is a measurable advantage, as your mental energy is freed up, preserving resources.

These decisions require experience, both with your own style of play and with your opponent's. As computer games evolve, we see games becoming better and better as they implement strategies input by their creators. But, what they still don't do well, is change strategies during play, from one skirmish to the next, or from one game to the next, based on assessments of wins and losses against particular opponents.

I won't say that these types of strategic decisions cannot be programmed into a computer. But they are, still, uniquely human experiences.

What Should an AI Do?

Computers can be programmed to learn about an opponent, from tactic to tactic, from game to game, to weigh previous battles and decide when they should learn from a victory or defeat to try something new. Computers can be programmed to examine an opponent's weaknesses to decide whether to play against them, or maybe even judge that that is what they are expecting and try something totally surprising.

An AI with no ability to learn and adapt, or with glaring repetition or weaknesses is a boring AI.

However, an AI with no weaknesses is also a boring AI. AI's should not be perfect reactors to every situation. If they are, then an entire facet of human strategy goes out the window. What is the fun if you can't exploit a weakness? If you have to choose between two strategies, and either of them are equal on the books, then there is little reward or punishment for choosing either when your opponent will competently handle either with aplomb. You expect your opponent to learn from exploitation, but not to not have any.

Perfect AI doesn't mean that it can't be fooled, however. Even a perfect AI can't (shouldn't) know whether an advancing column is a feint or a main attack. It has to juggle risk versus what it knows about you, while you have the same opportunity to do so about it.

One of the main arguments by Gary Kasparov against the famous Chess match of 1997 was that the computer was fed incredible amounts of information about him while he was not privy to information about the computer's previous matches. That gave a decided strategic advantage to the computer.

Even if the game is solved, so long as both players aren't give enough time to exhaustively search the solution space, each needs to make strategic decisions against their particular opponent.

Yehuda

Perky Goth Mechanics

Invisible City Productions, a collective of game designers, writers, and artists who occasionally release free games, has just released Perky Goth, a downloadable card game.

The theme and artwork is sure to please some, such as the Munchkin/Chez Geek loving crowd. Only one mechanic in the game interests me, and that is the scoring. Your final score is the average of your two point counts minus the difference between your two point counts. Very curious.

Like Tigris and Euphrates, this means that you have to progress in both counts at the same time. However, you cannot just simply grow exponentially in one count while making short gains in the other. You truly need a balanced score. A final count of 3 and 2 will beat a final count of 66 and 22.

Doing the math, you can see that given:

a >= b
(a+b)/2 - (a-b)

your score is:

a/2 + b/2 - a + b

which simplifies to:

-a/2 +3b/2

So you don't score any points at all if your higher score is 3 times as large as your lower score. Every one point less difference gives you a half a point for your score.

I kind of like it, and in any case, kudos for coming up with it, assuming that it is original.

Yehuda

Technorati tags: board games, board game

Weekend Gaming

Gin Rummy

Tal wanted to play something while we were waiting for our guests. I had already played a lot of Oh Hell, so we played some hands of Gin Rummy.

Surely Gin Rummy is one of those rite-of-passage games, where you learn the basics and then there is nothing else left to discover.

A quick review of the rules as I play it:

Each player is dealt ten cards, and one is flipped up. Each player on his turn takes either the face up card in the discard pile or from the top of the deck. On the very first play, the first player may take the face up card, or if the first player does not want the face up card, the dealer may opt to take it and begin play. Otherwise, the first player picks from the deck. A player must always discard. After discarding, the player may call Gin, knock, or pass.

Players are trying to form melds of length 3, 3, and 4. Each meld can be a three-of-a-kind or a straight in one suit. Cards go from Ace up to King, Ace is like 1.

If you call Gin, you have all required melds (ten cards). The opponent discards his completed melds and counts up the remaining points (pictures are 10 points each). Add 10 and then add to your score. For the purposes of completed melds, the opponent may discard any melds of three or four cards, including three 3-card melds or two 4-card melds, even though they would not be useful for calling Gin, which requires exactly two 3-card melds and one 4-card meld.

If you knock, you discard completed melds and count your remaining points which must be 10 points or under. Your opponent does the same. If his points are greater than yours, you add the difference to your score. Otherwise, your opponent adds the difference plus 10 to his score.

If you pass, it is your opponent's turn to play.

I am aware of a number of variations. Some play that the first player is dealt 11 cards, instead of the elaborate offering of the face up card to the dealer. Some play that Gin is worth 20 points. And so on.

Rummy strategy appears to be pretty straightforward:

• Keep track of discards, as well as cards taken by your opponent, and don't play matching cards if possible.
• Pulling outside straights (to a 7-8) is twice as likely than inside straights (to a 6-8) or a straight on the border (A-2 or Q-K).
• A standard set of cards is a trio such as (7-7-8) where any of four cards can complete the set, after which the odd card is discarded.
• It is never worth picking up a card from the discard unless it actually forms a set, since the odds of picking an equivalent or better card are high and you don't want to give out information to your opponent.
• If you are going to knock, knock early, before round four or so, or don't bother, unless you have only one or two points.

This is easy enough that I pretty much play on automatic, although Tal is still learning.

In one hand, I had 8c-7c-6c-7d-6d-6h. This can form either a straight and a trio, or a three-of-a-kind and a trio. The trio is limited; if I use the straight, the trio only has three possible completions instead of the usual four, since the other 6 is already in the straight. If I use the three-of-a-kind, again the trio only has three possible completions.

However, as a whole, the entirety has six completions, which is decidedly better than any run of the mill meld and an unassociated trio. I suppose that I've always noticed this instinctively, but never explicitly. Moral: always lump your trios and melds near each other numerically, if possible.

Michigan Rummy

Looking for something else easy to play the next day, I remembered another game that I enjoyed as a kid, Michigan Rummy. This game became the published game Tripoley. While I enjoyed this as a kid, playing it as an adult is just a little silly. It is still kind of enjoyable, although probably the closest you can get to the border between some skill and no skill, just on this side.

Basically (these rules look almost nothing like the rules at the above link, by the way):

A chip is anted onto each of eight piles: 10h, Jh, Qh, Kh, Ah, KQh, 8-9-10, and last-card. One hand more than the number of players is dealt. The dealer looks at his hand and can decide to keep it or swap for the extra hand (no going back is swapped).

Left picks any suit and leads the lowest card that suit. Any player with the next highest card in that suit has to play it. E.g. if a 4s is led, whoever has the 5s must play it. Continue until the next highest card isn't in play, because it is in the discarded hand. The player to play the last card then starts with the lowest card of either of the opposite color suits. E.g. if hearts or clubs was the last suit led, he must start with either his lowest heart or lowest diamond; it doesn't have to be the lowest card from both, only from either. Ace is high.

Anyone playing 10h, Jh, Qh, Kh, or Ah takes the pile on that card. Playing both Qh and Kh takes both piles as well as the QKh pile. Playing any 8-9-10 in sequence takes that pile. The first player to empty his hand takes the last-card pile and no further cards are played that round. Re-ante onto all piles, and dealer rotates.

There are only two real decisions to be made in the game. As dealer, you can decide whether to keep your hand or swap. The other is when, or if, you actually have to lead, which suit among two to lead. In 75% of the hands you get, it will make no difference. But once in a while, the correct lead ensures that you get the 8-9-10 before someone else can, or ensures that the round ends before other players can play their cash cards. It is for those precious few times that the game is slightly interesting, other than the general gambling excitement to be gained from watching someone finally produce an 8-9-10 after several rounds without one thereby gaining a windfall.

I doubt that I will suggest the game again, but it is ok for a non-confrontational gambling game.

Puerto Rico

The family visiting Nadine was still around, so we made another trip over in the afternoon. They were playing bridge, and requested my assistance for one hand, before we moved to Puerto Rico. Players were Rachel, Ginat (Nadine's daughter), Nadine, myself, and Beth together with her daughter, in that order.

Ginat and Beth don't play that often. Ginat was independent and stubborn, happily doing what she wanted to do, and often doing pretty well. Beth was more open to persuasion, and thus subject to an endless barrage of advice from Nadine and Rachel, and occasionally myself.

Rachel and I played by the book, mostly. Rachel started a little unusually with Builder/Small Market, but other than that, all went normally. There were three opening corns in the lot, so I guess she counted on getting one of them, and she did. I started with sugar by turn two, and coffee by turn four. I held a coffee monopoly, pretty much, and then got Factory, Indigo, Small Warehouse, Harbor, and City Hall, plus. Rachel got Indigo, Tobacco, Sugar, Factory, Harbor, Guild Hall, and so on, basically shadowing my steps.

Rachel won owing to having the additional extra corn, which gave her a slight vp boost, as well as enough colonists to run her Factory at a higher level for a few more turns than me. I also muffed one turn by taking some extra cash when I should have shipped, but Rachel also missed something similar later on, so it evened out. She ended up with one more shipping point and two more building points, winning 60 to 57, while the others had 51, and 40s.

Yehuda

Tom Vasel has a new link with advice for game designers from many of the best, collected from his numerous interviews.

Technorati tags: board games, board game, card games, card game, rummy, gin rummy, michigan rummy

Strategy

References: Brian and Tom at Tao of Gaming.

Brian implies that strategy means "plays that give better positions rather than immediate tactical advantage":

Is Caylus Strategic? More so than PR. There are "positional" affects (things that aren't immediately tactical, but that affect play). Larry brought up an example of "If I'm doing the shipping strategy, I'm going to want a harbor, or If I'm doing the factory, it will change my builds." Well, that's certainly true, and you can see "I want this, then this, then this." But I'm not sure it's positional. You could model the same effects as 'evaluation of future values'. If I have the factory, it's better if I have lots of good types. Ditto Harbor, but the Wharf wants specialization. My current position makes those better (or worse), and I don't have to look ahead to see it.

As usual, Brian is of the opinion that Puerto Rico is all tactical, and not strategic. We've argued about this before.

In the comments, Chris Farrel argues that strategy may just mean "what to do when you don't know the right tactics":

I wonder if a game with completely open information and no random elements must be purely tactical by definition. I've talked about it with the folks I've played it with, and nobody thought it was anything more than a highly tactical game.

A game can appear strategic because we just don't understand it. If there are lots of factors I haven't grasped yet, I'll attack them by making a generalized strategic choice ("OK, I'll focus on building castle bricks") because making all the tactical decisions is too burdensome. But that doesn't *generally* make the game itself any less tactical.

Others go on to imply that perhaps strategy is only possible with hidden information. Tom's post is then largely devoted to supporting this.


I don't think there is such a thing as a game where there are no hidden elements. As usual, I find example games to be helpful in this situation.

GAME A: Each player chooses an Ace or a King to play face down. The cards are revealed. If they match, player 1 wins, if they don't, player 2 wins.

Each player has complete control over what he chooses (no dice), and complete information as to the available options available to their opponent (no hand full of random cards). However, the game has a large and very crucial element of hidden information: what your opponent will choose.

GAME B: The same game, but player A reveals his card first, and then player B has to choose what card to play. You no longer have a game. Of course, this is dramatically simplified, but player B now evaluates the board with complete knowledge of what his opponent will do by the end of the game and chooses the best move. What you have is now a puzzle.

So unless we simply want to define strategy out of existence, we will have to come up with something better than "a game with hidden information", since there are no games without.

One thing you have to realize is that even if a game is "understood", it doesn't mean that there can be no strategic choices to make. It all depends on what you mean by "understanding".

If you have "solved chess", then for any given position you know the optimal play to make assuming that there is an optimal play. This assumption is a big one. Consider the following situations:

a) Your opponent can always win from this position if he plays perfectly. However, you know that he has a blind spot when it comes to tactical play. So you make a move that tempts him to make a mistake.

b) There are several different moves that are equally likely to produce a victory. How do you decide between them? For instance, Rock, Paper, Scissors can't be solved except by statistical analysis of all humans. When playing against a single human, it is more important to know THAT human.

c) Even if you have an optimal move, sometimes you may find a sub-optimal move is better against certain opponents, or, dare we say, more rewarding for the game playing experience.

What these factors have in common is the human experience. If you want to talk only about play that does not only mean "the best play given the information that I can calculate", then strategy is the decisions you make that are based on the human experience.

Maybe one day we will solve PR, but a strategic choice is to invest in high cash goods or high shipping goods. These choices are not necessarily "the best" choices, and they are not necessarily "sub-optimal" choices. They are human choices. Maybe your opponent is not good at handling your chosen strategy. Maybe you feel most comfortable handling it, yourself. Maybe it just makes the game more interesting for you or your opponent.

Either way, the real definition of strategy hasn't really changed much. We all can agree that tactics is evaluating your position and making the best of it. Strategy is still, according to me, a guiding philosophy about the game that colors your tactical choices. It may be that from a grand distance that tactics and strategy have no firm clear border, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist as distinct concepts in human terms. We are not computers.

Yehuda

Update: I think I am letting you guys off the hook too easily. Even if you can see the optimal play from the start of the game, you can still define strategy as the overriding series of plays you will be making, and tactics as each of these plays. As Wikipedia puts it:

* The overall goal is to win a war against another country.
* The strategy is to undermine the other nation's ability to wage war by annihilating their military.
* The tactics (told to the combatants) are to do very specific things in a specific place.

In games, a game is strategic (and less tactical) if there are at least two different paths to achieve the same goal and the tactics you choose specifically favor one of these paths. A certain tactic becomes less valuable or more valuable depending on which path you are following. From the same position, two people will choose a different tactic both of which may be close to optimal or equally optimal based on their strategy. It is tactical (and less strategic) if there is only one path, or the paths are sufficiently muddied that from any position you have the same options and make the same choices regardless on any path.

Obviously I feel PR is at least somewhat strategic, but others don't.

Technorati Tags: board games, board game, games, tactics, strategy

Dice, Luck, Bah Humbug

What is the difference between teaching your child to play Chutes and Ladders the regular way, and teaching your child to play Chutes and Ladders where each player has two pieces and they have to choose which one to move each time they roll?

The difference is that the former is the child's first introduction to the great world of gambling, while the second is an introduction to using your brain.

Dice? Feh.

Why do people enjoy dice and luck in games? Because people are addicted to gambling. Really, what is the excitement in that two second period between the time you roll the dice and the time it lands and you discover what will happen to you in the game? Why do you enjoy that?

I think it must be something to do with entering a place where it is not you vs. him anymore, but you vs. the world. The world is more arbitrary than an opponent. Two people are treated equally when they face the world. Either one can win. Two people against each other are not equal. The more skilled one is usually going to win.

Without that die roll, the only way to consistently win is to work at it. Even if your opponent hands you advice and insight into his or her own strategy, you still have to absorb it, make it part of yourself and become a better player. And this takes work and time.

Sure, better players will win Risk more often than worse players. But really: when you play against a better Risk player, and the other player outmaneuvers you, but you win anyway because of lucky dice - did you really "win"? When playing against a worse player and you play better and still lose because of a few dice rolls - did you "lose"? We all know that if you play the game 1000 times, and you are twice as good as your opponent, you will be winning twice as many games. What is the point, then, of a single win or loss? A die roll rolled up good - oh boy, I win. It rolled up bad - oh darn, I lose.

On Luck vs. Randomness.

Yehuda

Puerto Rico Strategy vs Tactics

The Tao of Gaming (http://gaming.powerblogs.com) is currently discussing the lack of strategy in Puerto Rico, that the game is basically a tactical game of "get the most vp's from whatever your current situation is".

The original source was from Chris Farrel:

"Puerto Rico taunts you with strategic elements, but it's really just a brutal short-term optimization game with a minimal strategic component ... "Strategic" and "Tactical" are of course notoriously tractable terms. I could probably redefine "strategic" on a case-by-case basic in a way such that no game would ever be considered strategic. But one concept I might use is "can I take a short-term loss for a long-term gain?" To me, the answer in Puerto Rico is always no."

I posted some disagreements, as follows:

I totally disagree, but probably because we need to clarify the difference between strategy and tactics. It sounds to me that your definition of strategy is just "long term tactics".

Here are my definitions:

Tactics: the planned actions that you take given a particular situation to advance your strategy used to fulfill the objectives.

Strategy: the general principles guiding your tactical decisions to reach your ultimate objective.

What is the ultimate objective in Puerto Rico? It is to have more victory points than any other player, and if not, then to have the most cash/goods.

What are the strategies? Several: Large shipping through production, large shipping through storage, large trading through markets, large trading through cash crops and office, many quarries, flexibility through hacienda, agility through hospice and/or university, phase jumping through factory, etc..., etc... Some of the strategies have proved to be better then others over the past two years, but there is still no one fixed strategy that always wins, and there are some under-utilized strategies that may make comebacks over time. I have been whipped soundly by Hospice recently, even though it is generally regarded as a poor strategy. And when you take into account the expansion buildings (and when you add my own seven expansion building sets), each game requires a reassessment of the viable strategies to play.

Also, Puerto Rico sometimes requires you to change strategies in mid-game, when the one you were following is no longer viable.

Tactics: An example of a tactic could be: I will take this role and block the trading house, then he will take that role, and then I will become governor, and then I will trade again, giving me enough to build Factory. If your strategy includes "get Factory", then this is a viable tactic for moving your strategy forward. If your strategy includes "get Wharf", then the tactical decisions will have to change to reflect this.

If you are not playing with any focussed strategy, then every time it is your turn you will look at the board and say: how can I make the most number of vps over the next few rounds, or most gps of the next few rounds, compared to my opponents? While this may work once in a while, it is unlikely that you will win the majority of games this way.

Puerto Rico is not strategic? Hogwash. You would be more correct to say that El Grande is not strategic, but even EG has a few different strategies: concentrate on a few places and the castillo, or try to get second place everywhere.

...

I have found that a great way to lose is to take the maximum benefit for yourself Right Now.

If I have a better shipping situation set up, say Harbor/Wharf, I am often tempted into taking Builder right now because it will give me a few more VP's than my opponents. Crafting will give me nothing Right Now.

But because of the cyclical nature of the game, it is crucial to continue the craft/captain cycle as fast as possible. Failing to take Craftsman will result in a long term loss later on for my short term gain.

Good players can see this by turn 6 or 7, right when midgame is starting. I think defining the concept of strategy away by substituting the goal of the game - "gain vps" - is a straw man argument.

I am not contradicting Alex; I don't go into a game knowing that I will play "harbor shipping", or "guild hall building". In the same vein, I don't go into a chess game knowing I will play "X offense" or "Y defense". The situation changes, and you have to adapt. Nevertheless, the patterns are there and you have to know them.

"guild hall building" is something to think about on turn 3 already, because it is stronger than "residence settler". This doesn't mean I won't take residence settler. It means that I have several strategic game plans, and I aim towards them. "diverse production factory". "corn wharf". Of course there are strategies.

If you play PR by dropping yourself into every turn with no plan and just do whatever give you the most vp's within 2 rounds, you will lose against better players, period.

... and as far as short term loss for long term gain:

I'll trade this barrel for GP, and sacrifice the 1 VP I would have gotten shipping it, because next round I'll build a building worth 2 more VP?

I'll build this inferior building to prevent someone else from building it and getting a lock on shipping vp's?

I'll ship now and lose vp's, to prevent my opponent from trading?

I'll take this role which doesn't give me anything to prevent my opponent from beenfitting form it twice.

I'll give up this building for that building.

I'll take this role instead of that one.

I'll ship this good for less to lock this boat.

I'll trade this lesser good to prevent my opponent from trading it.

No short term plays for long term goals. Yah.

...

Just one more note:

It is possible to destroy the term strategy by just calling it "long term tactics".

Let's say you have to take a city. You could employ the "siege" strategy, or you could employ the "direct force" strategy, or you could employ the "raise dissent" strategy.

Does this mean that when it actually comes down to taking the city you have to stick with "only one" and make no changes? Can't you do all three? Can't you assess how things are going each day and maximize your position from whatever the situation is?

OK, you could look really far into the future and say that "if I do this, and then this, then the city will fall." Does that deny the concept of strategy, just because you employed tactics? No. You just used your tactics wisely to implement one or more strategies that are best suited for the situation.

If the city has stockpiled food, the strategy of siege will probably fail, and it will be a tactical error to attempt to employ this strategy.

Yehuda