This is a good post for Christmas Day, with all of you at home with your families playing board games.
Dan Luu has an amusing post explaining how you can win Codenames by just memorizing the configurations of the 40 setup carts. The basic strategy is to play your best until you can figure out the unique configuration, then you win. The fun part is that if you’re playing against a team that hasn’t learned this memorization trick, then you can win even if you don’t guess any words yourself—you just take advantage of the config information that you get from their correct guesses (along with any wrong guesses that come up)! If both teams have memorized the 40 cards, then you get to a new level of strategy.
As Luu says, no one would want to play Codenames in this way. The whole point of the game is to guess the words; if you’re gonna do it by memorizing patterns, why play the game in the first place? On the other hand, he also points out that once this information is there, you can’t un-see it. So it’s a balance.
This comes up in the rules of Codenames itself: you’re not allowed to give clues that suggest the position of the word on the grid, nor are you allowed to make faces or otherwise give clues as people are guessing. It can be hard to avoid giving this information sometimes!
More generally, most games can be “cracked” through a backdoor approach in some way or another. Here’s how Luu puts it:
Personally, when I run into a side-channel attack in a game or a game that’s just totally busted if played to win . . . I think it makes sense to try to avoid “attacking” the game to the extent possible. I think this is sort of impossible to do perfectly in Codenames because people will form subconscious associations (I’ve noticed people guessing an extra word on the first turn just to mess around, which works more often than not — assuming they’re not cheating, and I believe they’re not cheating, the success rate strongly suggests the use some kind of side-channel information. That doesn’t necessarily have to be positional information from the cards, it could be something as simple as subconsciously noticing what the spymasters are intently looking at.
Dave Sirlin calls anyone who doesn’t take advantage of any legal possibility to win is a sucker (he derogatorily calls such people “scrubs”) (he says that you should use cheats to win, like using maphacks in FPS games, as long as tournament organizers don’t ban the practice, and that tournaments should explicitly list what’s banned, avoiding generic “don’t do bad stuff” rules). I think people should play games however they find it fun and should find a group that likes playing games in the same way. If Dave finds it fun to memorize arbitrary info to win all of these games, he should do that. The reason I, as Dave Sirlin would put it, play like a scrub, for the kinds of games discussed here is because the games are generally badly broken if played seriously and I don’t personally find the ways in which they’re broken to be fun.
It gets tricky sometimes, though. Consider those goofy words that are in the Scrabble dictionary but aren’t really words, for example ef (“the letter F”) or po (“a chamber pot”). These are not English words! On the other hand, when you’re actually playing and you see an opportunity for ef or po or whatever, it’s hard to deny yourself the opportunity. In that case, there’s an easy solution: the rules allow the players to agree on any dictionary ahead of time, so no need to use the Scrabble dictionary. On the other hand, this will annoy serious players.
There’s more of gray area with collusion, which can “break” almost any multiplayer game. In poker, collusion is a form of cheating. I don’t know how casinos or informal games monitor or enforce the rule against collusion, but you’re not supposed to do it. You’re allowed to lie in poker but not to cheat.
But what about a game such as Monopoly or Risk where bargaining is part of the game? Here’s a simple strategy in a 3-player game of Monopoly that will up your odds of winning from 1/3 to nearly 1/2: Before the game begins, pick one of the other players and agree to flip a coin, after which the winner of the flip will devote all their effort to helping the other player win. That’s easy enough to do: just buy whatever property that comes up and sell to the other player for $1. It won’t guarantee a win but it’s gotta take the win probability to very close to 100%. Similarly with Risk. Now, nobody’s gonna play this way because it’s no fun (except maybe once as a joke). To put it another way, “winning a game of Monopoly or Risk” does not have much positive value in itself; the fun is in winning the game legitimately. Again, though, there is a gray zone, and other players will rightly get annoyed if they see player A deliberately trying to help player B without there being a good reason in the context of a game. In Risk, “I won’t attack you here if you don’t attack me there” is a legitimate strategy, but “I don’t attack you because I want to help you win” is not so cool.
A few years ago I was playing a lot of online chess, and one thing I noticed is that some players would set up opening traps: clearly unsound sequences of moves that would get them a win if their opponents played naively and hadn’t seen the trick before. My thought was: Why do that? Winning against a stranger using a trap, what’s the point of that? Upon reflection, though, I decided to not be so bothered by this. If you try to spring a trap, then the fun part is when the trap fails and then you have to get out of a bad position of your own devising. So, all good.
Years ago I read the book Thursday Night Poker by Peter Steiner. One thing Steiner discusses is that in a casual game you can often do just fine by playing really tight, a strategy that won’t work against good players but can make you steady money if some of the people at the table are just playing for fun. As Steiner says, though, most of us are not playing in a friendly poker game with the goal of maximizing our dollars. We’re playing poker for fun, and “action”—getting involved in hands, making betting decisions, going up against the other players—is where the fun is at. No poker player would be a “scrub”—you’ll always take advantage of any legal way to win, it’s not like you’d ignore relevant information that someone reveals—but, even in poker, winning is not the only goal.
All of this is kind of obvious, but as Luu discusses, sometimes it needs to be pointed out, to push against naive models of the world. Also, the bit about the Codenames cards is cool—I’d never thought about that!
We play a lot of board and card games with my daughter (age 5), it is a booming industry with many publishers who crank out games, complete with awards, reviewers, etc. What I noticed is that many games are very badly designed, a lot of them are 90-95% simulating an analog computer you feed with random draws, and only about 5-10% of the outcome is the effect of player strategy. These are very frustrating, because this becomes apparent after you have spent your money and invested in understanding the game.
Also once you know elementary probability (or call it combinatorics), you get a large advantage in a lot games without any significant effort, and if you know recursive methods (eg Bellman equations) you can solve for or approximate the best strategy very easily because the games have so few states.
I don’t know if the publishing companies just lack the personnel to understand their own games, or if they just do not bother. A lot of apparent effort goes into backstories and illustrations (on cards and the board) and the design of pieces, but I wonder if anyone ever sketches the finite state machine associated with the simple games and calculates some probabilities with elementary linear algebra.
I’m assuming your 5 year old daughter hasn’t yet figured out finite state machines, and just enjoys playing the games with you?
Monopoly is a game that was INTENDED to be INFURIATING to play. Essentially there’s a huge advantage to the first mover, and you should buy up everything you can early on, because the whole point of the game is to show how land grabs followed by rent enforced by the state is a racket designed to make the rich richer. Played with the optimal strategy the outcome is essentially random, depending on the roll of the die as to who lands on what properties early on. Once someone has a notable wealth advantage from random fluctuations, they will mechanically collect all the money and slowly grind the rest of the players into bankruptcy.
From Wikipedia: “Monopoly is derived from The Landlord’s Game, created in 1903 in the United States by left-wing feminist Lizzie Magie, as a way to demonstrate that an economy rewarding individuals is better than one where monopolies hold all the wealth.[1][5] It also served to promote the economic theories of Henry George—in particular, his ideas about taxation.[6] The Landlord’s Game originally had two sets of rules, one with tax and another on which the current rules are mainly based.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)
The tax mentioned is specifically the land use tax concept, often called Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
In any case, I played monopoly a couple times as a kid, and then when I realized how it worked never played it again.
I have never played Codenames, but this reminds me of an ongoing debate about GeoGuessr. Geoguessr is a wonderful online game in which one is deposited at some place in the world that has Google Street View, and one has to wander around (in Street View) and figure out one’s location. The closer to the true location, the more points. One can do this as an individual, and there are also competitive modes in which two people are given the same starting location and a time limit. All I do is the “Daily Challenge,” together with my younger son almost every evening, which is “individual,” but there’s a ranking of scores.
The connection to this blog post: There are people who cheat, which is clearly wrong. (And sad.) Cheating might be googling information on signs, or more crudely looking at the html of street view pages (I think). The gray area is what’s called “meta” clues on the reddit discussion board. Some people, like me, think one should use only clues that would be visible if you were dropped into that part of the world — street signs, alphabets, the direction of the sun, highway markers, etc.; the fun of the game is in large part imagining finding your bearings in an unfamiliar landscape. Others think it’s fine to use clues like the type of Google car (which differs in different countries and which one can “see” looking down) or the image quality (again different in different regions) — “meta” clues inherent in Street View coverage, but not in the place as it normally is. Though I dislike it, I wouldn’t view using meta clues as cheating; it reflects a different goal, one of optimizing “the game” rather than optimizing “the experience.” I think it’s sad that most games can, and are, dominated by the former — the French Scrabble champion doesn’t speak French and memorized the French dictionary, for example. Why live like this? I am, by the way, aware that my Daily Challenge play is in itself a form of cheating, since there are two of us playing as one, but I’m not going to ditch my beloved teammate.
I enjoy Geoguesser for the same reasons you do – using my knowledge especially of biozones and physiography to see where I am. But if I were *really* beamed into some unknown location I’d definitely use all the clues at my disposal rather than restricting myself to the field of view presented by the camera and just playing for the fun of testing certain types of knowledge. That’s potentially a fun kind of game too. To me the different types of play are like different games using the same “board”.
Same for Scrabble. The game you play with your kids is different than the game you play with a competitive player. My dad was a competitive scrabble player. I get it that it’s not fun if you’re playing against a competitive player who knows the scrabble dictionary if you don’t. It’s also not fun playing tackle football with an NFL player if you’re not a competitive football player. :) Same difference: sunday afternoon tackle football on the elementary school field is a different game than the NFL. Like champion scrabble players, NFL players work out intensively and are trained to use the rules to their advantage down to the letter. If you are a fan of football, you know the nuances of the rules. But there aren’t many non-player fans of scrabble, so most peole don’t know the nuances of Scrabble rules, and they default to their home-made “playing-with-kids-game” rule book, get crushed, feel bad, then complain about the rules – but the real problem is they just didn’t know them.
I also don’t share Andrew’s view that the scrabble dictionary is full of non-words. The word “ef” is definitely a word. It’s the word for the symbol “f”, just like “alpha” is the word for the symbol “𝜶”. OK, english isn’t quite as elegant or sophisticated sounding as Greek, but an “ef” is still a thing. It’s the character “f”. If it were true that the scrabble dictionary was full of non-words made up just to make the game more strategic, there would be all kinds of ridiculous words with high scoring letters like ZXQJK – but they aren’t there.
Merry Christmas! :)
I played GeoGuessr a few times, and I even occasionally watch a YouTube channel where someone plays it. It’s amazing how good some players are: “From the vegetation it’s clearly the tropics, and the sun is in the north so we are in the Southern hemisphere. The telephone pole has long diagonal supports at the top and the crossbar is asymmetrical. This is somewhere in the Lesser Sunda Islands of Indonesia.”
But I think meta information (like the resolution, and the type of car taking the photo)… once you see that, you can’t unsee it. I think it’s not only fair to use, it would be almost impossible not to use it. If you know you’re in Ghana, it would be hard and perhaps pointless to pretend you don’t know that.
So in most ways I think I agree with you. But not when it comes to the French Scrabble champion. Indeed, I can’t even understand the source of your…what’s the right word… “condescension”, I suppose. Scrabble has different rules in different languages — in the sense that the list of allowed words is different — and this guy decided to play the French game, and he won. Do you think people should only play words whose meanings they know? That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad rule, you could enforce it by letting other players challenge the word by demanding a definition. Perhaps chatGPT could be a disinterested judge of whether the definition is close enough. But anyway it’s not the current rule and I don’t see why you think it’s bad to play words you can’t define. De gustibus non est disputandum.
When I am in a large group, I love a game called Werewolves (aka Mafia). At some point, I realised that for most players, winning the game is pure chance. Some of the assigned character roles have better odds than others, but affecting the a priori winning chances is possible only on the margins. Once I realised that my ability to influence the game in my favour was extremely limited, I started playing the game as a trickster, doing random things to confuse teammates and opponents alike. I would liken my fun strategy to a greedy algorithm, choosing the most fun locally, knowing that my choices will not affect my chances of winning later.
On the other hand, I also love the game Camel Up. It is a betting game on a camel race. From a probabilistic point of view, this game is interesting because of its nested probabilities. Calculating an exact probability in your head in a reasonable amount of time is basically impossible. However, it is possible to calculate the mode of outcomes, which is usually sufficient in a betting scenario.
Both games are completely probabilistic. However, one game has too little information to update the player’s beliefs in any meaningful way, which makes playing as a trickster with people who believe there is a winning strategy a lot of fun.* The other game uses nested probabilities to obscure the exact distribution of outcomes. I think the latter concept might be especially appealing to this audience, as it makes calculating optimal outcomes much more difficult.
*Please only manipulate people in such games and not in real life.
Why is “po” meaning a chamber pot not an English word?Growing up on the 80s in England we knew this word from our parents and used it to refer to the cat litter tray. In fact, it was only as an adult that I learnt that this was not the standard word for the litter tray!
For me the best ‘commercial’ board game is Clue. It has far less luck than Monopoly and several different strategies for winning.
At least you can fix the codenames configuration memorization problem with additional cards (from the Duet version) or a random generator app.
There are legal and fun ways to do well with extra guesses and/or use extra information that are not about illegally tracking eyes of clue givers… how long it takes to come up with a clue… or the avoidance of a similar more obvious clue for a given pair (say) can suggest the need to avoid accidentally invoking a third related-but forbidden-word, etc.
There’s lots of games where this sort of collusion is a mathematically effective strategy. Often it is explicitly forbidden, however.
I’m reminded of a brouhaha on the “men’s room” subforum of a diet forum (more fun than it sounds). We had a fantasy football tournament and one player had his wife collude with him (e.g. making trades that were not in her interest, gifting him players.) This sort of strategy is forbidden in the rules. He was called out for it and ended up running away in shame.
If the rules are not detailed enough to rule this strategy out, it’s usually implicitly not considered sporting. I would maybe make an exception for Risk, since that whole game is built around backstabbing allies anyways. In which case collusion is sort of more psychically appropriate.
There’s also examples from the chess world (Bobby Fischer kerfuffle) where “team play” was used to wear down a strong opponent (drawn out draws for instance, before a final match with the team’s strongest member). This sort of team play is (at least nowadays) forbidden in most chess tournaments.