Boardgames & Math

Boardgames & Math

Boardgames & Math – Liar’s Dice

For tonight’s Innovation Session I’m going to make a Liar’s dice cheat sheet. This will hopefully be a simple and beautiful way to remember what the odds of a certain bet are at any point in the game – even if it’s been a long night. Liar’s dice is a simple game. Each player starts with five dice, everyone rolls and you take turns guessing the combined dice of everyone, even though you can only see your five. The bidding has to increase so eventually someone gets called a liar and everyone shows. Either the liar or the person that called them one loses and must discard a die. The game then repeats, now with one less die. See the full rules here. Most of the game revolves around bluffing, second guessing and such. But, at the end of the round, someone has to be right and that is always

Boardgames & Math

Boardgames & Math – Pass the Pigs – Part 2

This week I’m going to pick off where I left off  last week – analyzing the game Pass the Pigs. If you haven’t read last week’s post yet, you should do that first here. At this point, we’re going to switch from solving algebraically to doing a bit of programming. All of the code I’m using can be found here – feel free to fork it and play along. Threshold Simulation Right off the bat – I’m going to check if last week’s conclusion is correct by running a simulation of the different risk thresholds. What we concluded was that once you were above 18 points your rolls would be risking more than their potential reward. In the chart below the x axis represents the risk threshold of the player, how many points they are comfortable accruing each round before passing, and the boxplot represents the results they have after 1,000 simulations. You

Boardgames & Math

Boardgames & Math – Pass the Pigs – Part 1

The Kroleski home is one that enjoys boardgames. We’re a fun loving kind of people. My wife & I are both very competitive though – so things can get a bit intense when we start playing. In order to get the upper hand for our game nights – I’m starting a new series where I use math to look for ways I can increase my chances of winning various board games. Tonight I’m going to look at a game called Pass the Pigs. We heard about this game from our friends Chris & Gretchen & ended up buying it before our New Zealand trip because it was light weight and we could play it anywhere. For those who haven’t played before – here are the rules. This game is perfect for my first ‘Boardgames & Math’ because it is incredibly simple. There is really only one decision to make; should