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The Science of Game Strategy
First time accepted submitter JacobAlexander writes "Writing in PNAS, a University of Manchester physicist has discovered that some games are simply impossible to fully learn, or too complex for the human mind to understand. Dr Tobias Galla from The University of Manchester and Professor Doyne Farmer from Oxford University and the Santa Fe Institute, ran thousands of simulations of two-player games to see how human behavior affects their decision-making. From the article: 'In simple games with a small number of moves, such as Noughts and Crosses the optimal strategy is easy to guess, and the game quickly becomes uninteresting. However, when games became more complex and when there are a lot of moves, such as in chess, the board game Go or complex card games, the academics argue that players' actions become less rational and that it is hard to find optimal strategies.'"
Isn't that the whole point?
Not being able to "solve" games like chess like you can with Tic-Tac-Toe (http://xkcd.com/832/) is what makes them fun and playable. Otherwise it quickly gets boring. It's also why it isn't always as fun to play against the computer on really high levels. They can cheat and solve the next bajillion moves.
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Even high-level players do tend to use a bit of that kind of thing. Kasparov mentioned that was one of the odd things about playing Deep Blue, that unlike playing another grandmaster, there wasn't this human meta-game element: he couldn't intimidate the machine into screwing up.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'm pretty sure that the optimal strategy with Magic is just to wait until Wizards of the Coast is feeling a bit pinched and decides to release a new, more powerful, bunch of cards that you just can't stay competitive without buying and then go buy those...
I think it is a matter of taste, but a game that purposely allows for unfair circumstances based on the cards you own or not does not seem to be a good game for me. I am also not very found of the idea that complex (and in Magic's case Encyclopedic) rules are a good thing for a game.
Great games, in my opinion, would be Chess or Go, for example. Games that have incredibly simple rules and still lead to incredibly complex situations and strategies.
That's why they're fun. With a solvable game, you play the game. With an unsolvable game, you play the player.
Of course, it's a lot less fun once you're playing the stock market or global thermonuclear war, but no less rewarding.
And of course of course, they're neglecting that any attempt at predicting the behavior of a market will affect the behavior of that market such that the predictions no longer hold true.
Kudos to anyone who can pull off the ultimate hack: invest your money based on your -unpublished- theory of how the market will respond the theory that you ARE about to publish.
As in Magic the Gathering? The card game with 12,000+ individual cards? In my honest opinion, it's the greatest game ever made.
In my opinion, any game where a higher budget gives players more strategic options, is immediately disqualified from being the "greatest game ever made." I might be able to play the game with a $10 investment in a starter pack, but I will lose 100% of the time against players with a bigger budget, no matter what my skill level is.
That's great in terms of profit for the game producer, but pretty weak in terms of actual gameplay.
(That's not to say I don't think Magic is a decent game. It is. But the collectible nature weakens the game in terms of pure gameplay.)
Well, M:tG has both 'resource complexity', there are a vast number of possible cards you can play with and they do an equally vast number of slightly different things, and it also has what you are calling 'strategic' (though I would say most of these games have strategy AND tactics) complexity. That is even if you play the same 2 M:tG decks against each other many many times the players are likely to be able to make a number of different tactical choices in each game. Actually I think the tactical depth and strategic depth of chess are a good bit higher than with M:tG, but its a fairly complex game with a huge number of setup options (IE how you make your deck). The tactical consequences of a move or the strategic consequences of learning certain lines or aspects of the game in chess are however more significant than the individual moves in M:tG, which can often be quite insignificant.
Go of course occupies the uttermost extreme in terms of being utterly simple in form and yet so immensely complex in both strategic and tactical depth that no software yet written even approaches the better human players.
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If you draw nothing but lands, you're screwed. Get no lands, you're screwed.
This, without exception, is my biggest problem with Magic. No matter how good you are or how good your deck is, it's realistically very possible to be completely screwed out of a game by the random nature of your deck.
That's probably the reason I'm such a fan of Dominion. It's a card game where strategy is truly the only difference between winners and losers. Add in its low cost of entry and high replayability, and you got a game that's (in my opinion) much better made than Magic.
I agree 100%. A lot of people will say that you don't have to spend a lot of money to make a deck that wins. Those people are kidding themselves! Sometimes, you've just gotta pay the money to get the good cards.
Luckily, there are formats that are designed to reward skill more than the size of your bank account: sealed deck and booster draft. Both require participants to buy unopened packs and use them, but paying $15 or $25 every once in a while is far less expensive in the long run.
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I'm pretty sure that the optimal strategy with Magic is just to wait until Wizards of the Coast is feeling a bit pinched and decides to release a new, more powerful, bunch of cards that you just can't stay competitive without buying and then go buy those...
Yes, and no. Mostly no.
You need to purchase the new cards because to be competitive, (as in participate in tournaments) you need to be using cards from the current block. The old cards, simply aren't permitted in the block.
(Although many old cards from various old sets are reprinted in the current set, and you can play with the originals of any reprinted card if you have the original.)
That effectively solves the power-inflation problem. This years set doesn't have to be more powerful than last years set to appeal to players because nobody is using last years set in competitions. That was, frankly, a very smart move by wotc for the overall health of the game.
Each year the game changes, but the cards aren't on a permanent run towards ever more power. They can even print cards that are strictly inferior to existing cards and those cards can still be desirable due to what is currently allowed.
Of course, yes, you do still have to buy this years set to play competitively which is a smart move from a business point of view. Otherwise, there'd be no reason to keep buying cards.
But pre-constructed is just one format, and there are many; draft games are quite popular where you build your deck on the fly from a pool of available cards (which can new unopened packs in sanctioned tournements, to one of your friends piles of commons in an informal setting... and then play with that. Many many players prefer various draft formats both in tournaments and in private because it does to a large degree eliminate having to buy the expensive rares to be competitive.