Game musings

Another thing to play test

There’s a family of games including gin, crazy eights, and straight dominos which have a lot of spoilage of the other player and inferencing of what they have. Unfortunately it’s usually fairly hard to deduce what the opponent has, unlike in Holdem where they’re forced to hint strongly. Here is an idea for a game of this genre with the maximum amount of range inference possible:

2 players. There’s a deck of 16 cards, each of which has one of 4 colors in the center and one of four colors on the outer edge, with each combination occurring exactly once. Players are dealt 7 cards each with one card face up in the center. The remaining card is permanently out of the game. First player is selected randomly and thereafter they alternate. On a turn a player puts down one of their cards face up whose outer edge (the ‘bottom’ color) matches the center (‘top’) color on the card below it. First player to not have a legal move loses.

The funny thing about this game is that if the discarded card is made public then it’s a game of perfect information and analyzing it is straightforward, but with that one piece of hidden information complete analysis goes bonkers.

(For those of you who have gotten this far and are wondering: This won’t be in the suite of games I’m working on supporting on chain. It involves way too many turns and is of a very different flavor, where what I’m supporting are of necessity very few turns and are nash equilibrium games which require mixed strategies because that’s the flavor of Poker.)