We played a two player strategy game today, using all the information from +plus magazine.
The game is played as follows. At the start of a game each player decides on their three colour sequence for the whole game. The cards are then turned over one at a time and placed in a line, until one of the chosen triples appears. The winning player takes the upturned cards, having won that “trick”. The game continues with the rest of the unused cards, with players collecting tricks as their triples come up, until all the cards in the pack have been used. The winner of the game is the player that has won the most tricks. An average game will consist of around 7 “tricks”.
e.g. Player 1 picks RRB, Player 2 picks RBB and see who wins.
The question we thought about was:
- Is it just a game of chance, or if you are choosing second, could you improve your chance of winning?
There is a related game called Penny’s game, using Heads and Tails of a coin toss instead of playing cards. In this version, you just play until one person has won a “trick”. We worked out some of the odds given in the first table in this article.
We ended up having to sum a geometric series! Great fun!