Looney Labs Icehouse Mailing list Archive

Re: [Icehouse] Introduction to the list

  • FromJoseph Pate <jpate@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • DateTue, 21 Aug 2007 14:34:33 -0700 (PDT)
204 arrangements? That's impressive. By comparison, Fluxx only has 23 ways
to win. :)

Actually far more "winning combinations" than "ways to win", if you want to
count possible keeper + goal configs... but I like the number 23 so I'm
perfectly happy with the "ways to win" approach.

5 Keepers and 10 Cards in Hand are the first obvious wrinkles; throw in 
seemingly innocuous goals like "Peace (No War)" and it really gets 
interesting, since you not only have to account for your own keepers, but
other players' as well.

I do not [currently] possess the motivation to make any attempt to 
exhaustively compute the number of winning combinations, and such a table
isn't likely to mean much (except I had waaaaaaaaaaaay too much time on
my hands) since even things like hand size are variable, so for example
there's no "clean" way to compute odds like you can in poker.

It would be [somewhat] interesting to empirically keep track of which 
goals win most often... first guess, I'd go with the single-keeper goals 
like brain/peace/money/love (lesser % on AYNIL since it's more restrictive).
I'd almost expect 5 Keepers to be farther up the list than most of the 
2-keeper goals because it's so much less restrictive, Keeper Limits 
notwithstanding.

Perhaps if I ever get off my butt and try to update MicroFluxx (I have a
feeling I'd suck at the computer-player AI however), I'll keep track and
report my findings.  Note to community:  no human can survive by holding
their breath while waiting for this to happen  ;-)

Sorry for the long post.  Sometimes I just get verbose.

Cheers,
	Ankhst