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[Jimmmmm]

It's easy to program a computer to play Snakes and Ladders, and play it perfectly too, because there are no choices.

[sudgy]

Mao is a great game.

This post broke a rule. Try again.

Mao needs to die in a fire.  When the entire point of a game is to frustrate new players, it has no right to exist.

Certainly.  Zendo fills its inductive reasoning design space quite well and is better designed.  If you want random stuff, go play Fluxx.  Mao, along with Alien Letters, Crossed/Uncrossed, etc, are really just hazing rituals.

The point of Mao is not to frustrate new players.  At least not the way my friends and I play it.  Confusing newbies is funny, but the real game begins when everyone knows what's up.

So why not just tell people the rules so you can get to the "real game" quicker?

The three rules of Mao that you can say:
1. You play like crazy eights.
2. When someone wins, that person makes a new rule.
3. You can't talk about any rules other than these three.

[sudgy]

It's easy to program a computer to play Snakes and Ladders, and play it perfectly too, because there are no choices.

But they'll never outplay humans.

[Jimmmmm]

Well true, but they'll also never outplay intelligent humans at tic-tac-toe. Both are extremely easy for computers to play optimally.

[Grujah]

All this calvinball and the like talk and nobody backed me up on Forum Nomic.  ;P

[eHalcyon]

It's easy to program a computer to play Snakes and Ladders, and play it perfectly too, because there are no choices.

I remember an anecdote from a friend.  He bought one of those cheap computer games that just bundle a bunch of simple card games together.  One of the games was War.

War, where all you do is flip cards over.

The entire game was clicking a single button repeatedly.

The three rules of Mao that you can say:
1. You play like crazy eights.
2. When someone wins, that person makes a new rule.
3. You can't talk about any rules other than these three.

Actually, the only rule you can give is that you can't talk about the rules.  But we've gotten lenient about it.

[Synthesizer]

If beer pong is on there, darts should be too. Students at Delft University built a robot that could throw triple 20 - triple 20 - triple 20 = ONE HUNDRED AND EEEEIIIIGHTYYYYY every single time, and which would hit the double finisher >99% of the time. The robot beat the human world champion easily.

Then again, darts is annoying.

How long will it be before robots beat humans at soccer?

[Davio]

I wouldn't like to be on the receiving end of a bionic sliding tackle, ouch!

[DStu]

If beer pong is on there, darts should be too. Students at Delft University built a robot that could throw triple 20 - triple 20 - triple 20 = ONE HUNDRED AND EEEEIIIIGHTYYYYY every single time, and which would hit the double finisher >99% of the time. The robot beat the human world champion easily.

Then again, darts is annoying.

How long will it be before robots beat humans at soccer?

Depends on the restriction on the robots.  If you take a 7,32x2,44m² machine as goalkeeper, it should be quite easy to at least tie...

[Synthesizer]

If beer pong is on there, darts should be too. Students at Delft University built a robot that could throw triple 20 - triple 20 - triple 20 = ONE HUNDRED AND EEEEIIIIGHTYYYYY every single time, and which would hit the double finisher >99% of the time. The robot beat the human world champion easily.

Then again, darts is annoying.

How long will it be before robots beat humans at soccer?

Depends on the restriction on the robots.  If you take a 7,32x2,44m² machine as goalkeeper, it should be quite easy to at least tie...

Or.......(click)

[bozzball]

I came up with an idea to make Snakes and Ladders (slightly) more interesting - have multiple n boards.

Move mechanic:
 * Roll k dice, and allocate each dice to a board (with / without replacement)

Winning condition would be:
 First player to win on b boards wins.

Obvious values for k are 1 or n.
Obvious values for b are 1 or (n + 1) / 2.

[qmech]

I had a nice Snakes and Ladders set where each player had up to 4 pieces in play at once, which you could bring onto the start square by rolling a 6.  I guess that makes it a cross between the original game and Ludo; I consider that an improvement, but I'll concede that it's a matter of perspective.

[Ozle]

Surely with multiple dice no one ever lands on a snake?
I fail to see how that makes it better.

[Thisisnotasmile]

Surely with multiple dice no one ever lands on a snake?
I fail to see how that makes it better.

Probably because it introduces decisions other than "how long should I shake the die before rolling it?". Pretty much anything is an improvement to Snakes and Ladders.

[Ozle]

But Snakes and ladders is a game of chance.
Reducing that chance doesn't increase the skill level a significant amount.
Instead of just rolling and moving, you roll and move whichever piece doesn't land on a snake.

I fail to see how that is improvement, all it does is reduce some of the random element that IS the whole game and replaces it with very little.

[Davio]

It's hard to decipher whether some posts are serious or not. 

[Ozle]

It's hard to decipher whether some posts are serious or not. 

Will it help if I pull my serious face? *pulls serious face*

[Kirian]

And yet Chutes and Ladders is still somewhat more complex than this:

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/50849/le-boomb

Which has been described as "Like LCR, but without all the fiddly strategy."

[Brando Commando]

It's hard to decipher whether some posts are serious or not. 

The game you're talking about is a language game and would be very hard for a computer. I think it's one of the better games among those that a computer wouldn't be good at. Certainly better than Mao, though maybe not 7 Minutes in Heaven.

Anyway, to respond to the OP: I agree with the Go-lovers. I guess overall I like Go because it feels like such an organic extension of math: Relatively few starting principles that result in lots of intricate problems.

As for Dominion vs. chess: I think overall chess is deeper -- the problems inherent in chess can go several moves deep, with each step creating new possibilities.

Still, I find Dominion more fun probably because it's "broader", an idea that seems like a nice complement to "deeper": It feels like there are many more kinds of Dominion games, since set-ups can be so different. I suppose you achieve the same in chess by varying your first several moves, but from a weak player perspective the variations are a little dreary, and they create a big barrier to getting into the deeper game. (I mean, good players know the openings in their sleep and that's hard to get around if you only play occasionally.)

Anybody else want to comment on depth beyond Snakes and Ladders? I mean, let's just admit that it's the deepest game there is, but anybody want to nominate something for second place above Dominion/chess/Go?

[Jack Rudd]

(I mean, good players know the openings in their sleep and that's hard to get around if you only play occasionally.)

Yes and no. I mean, yes, good players will know what's going on in the openings they play regularly, and will have a reasonable idea what to do in an arbitrary opening, but the place where a good player has the biggest marginal advantage over an occasional player probably isn't opening knowledge.

[Brando Commando]

(I mean, good players know the openings in their sleep and that's hard to get around if you only play occasionally.)

Yes and no. I mean, yes, good players will know what's going on in the openings they play regularly, and will have a reasonable idea what to do in an arbitrary opening, but the place where a good player has the biggest marginal advantage over an occasional player probably isn't opening knowledge.

Is there a skill or set of skills that could be said to be the part of a good player's skill that gives them the greatest marginal advantage over the worse player...me?

[Jack Rudd]

(I mean, good players know the openings in their sleep and that's hard to get around if you only play occasionally.)

Yes and no. I mean, yes, good players will know what's going on in the openings they play regularly, and will have a reasonable idea what to do in an arbitrary opening, but the place where a good player has the biggest marginal advantage over an occasional player probably isn't opening knowledge.

Is there a skill or set of skills that could be said to be the part of a good player's skill that gives them the greatest marginal advantage over the worse player...me?

Up to a certain skill level of the weaker player, it tends to be tactics. Above that, it's probably positional or strategic play of some sort.

[popsofctown]

Opening strategy is actually an equalizer for weaker players in chess, I think.  If you are going up a good player with 10,000 hours of experience evenly divided between the most common opening, the second most common opening, and all the various other, weaker openings, then a player with 3,000 hours of experience can select one of those assorted, weak opening, and actually have some knowledge about that subset of games that the stronger player doesn't have. (He might have 1200 hours of experience>800 hours of experience, perhaps, where with the strong traditional opening he has no shot).

That said, at the really really low levels of play, where it's like, "I'm kinda sorta a lazy chess player that doesn't want to memorize my openings because I'm playing for fun", then yeah there's that gap where the guy that bothered to memorize correct opening answers has a big advantage.  But you can equalize that disadvantage with the amount of effort it takes to cram for a midterm, at the most.  The tactics and strategy and chess-related processing power are going to be your disadvantages.


I got sidetracked, but, I just wanted to post to point out that this is a fork, and someone made an "in response to OP" post that made me want to assure people that that I do not think my first post is adequate for starting a new thread, in general.
---------------------------------------------------------

Re: Dominion versus Chess:
Chess is a lot "broader" if you use variant rules like Fischer random (randomly rearranging the positions of the pieces behind the pawns at the start) or play faerie chess (various chesslike games where the pieces move in different ways).  If broadness was really the issue I think faerie chess would be more popular.  If you combined faerie chess and fischer random and had games with a king and a random set of pieces with random different powers each game, you'd have something a lot like Dominion in terms of various possible initial conditions, and I guarantee you the reason that isn't being sold in boxes on the shelf in board game stores isn't because no one thought of that.

The huge fun factor advantage Dominion has over chess and to slightly lesser extent Go is the lack of brute force analysis.  Both Go and Chess require players to count "if I go here, and he goes there, then I go here" out hundreds if not thousands of times each game, or face a marked disadvantage for not doing so.  The difference between a good player and a bad player at chess is selecting which of these chains to analyze, and identifying whether a possible position at the end of a chain is a "good" position or a "bad" position.  (If I double my pawns but develop my bishop is it worth it? etc)

[popsofctown]

In dominion you just decide whether positions are good or not.  Is it good to have 2 Loans somewhere in my deck or not?  You can't analyze the if/thens because randomness makes the if/thens pretty unknowable

[AJD]

(If I double my pawns but develop my bishop is it worth it? etc)

Well, if you develop your bishop you can put yourself in a good position to attack with one of your knights on your next turn, so I say go for it.