 Okay, crop drop. Let's do the real panel now. So how to win at games Now you might be thinking why would you run a panel on how to win a games? Also, you're gonna tell everyone how to win a game. This is gonna be some like trap We're famous for making panels with provocative titles and they're doing a completely different panel So obviously everybody wants to win the game you think if you're playing a game You're playing to win the game and this is like obvious. Why would you need to say that? I argue that the majority of you are not trying to win the games that you play I'm you're playing you're moving your pieces around like I'm gonna win this game I'm gonna win this counter-strike. I'm gonna do this thing, but you're not if you are really trying to be winning a lot more often than you are I know how often you're winning. It's not that often So before we get into this we really have to talk about I'm being very unprofessional and minimizing my slideshow to open Something that I don't have My laptop's like four years old give it a break. All right, so let me give some context in the video You're about to watch right so in the in the 90s, right? The New York Jets, they sucked I still hate them, but they suck less now you have to admit, right? It's a championship, right? But they sucked big time like oh, dude. Oh, and we're terrible, right? They won so few games Right that the fact was there was no way they can make the playoffs and if you don't know this right in most sports Professional ones the worst team gets the first draft pick the next year It helps you boost you up right the shittiest team gets the best new players to help them become better and the best That's even wins the Super Bowl gets the last pick kind of like how in power grid if you're in last place You get first crack at the resources, right? So the Jets are so terrible and after every NFL game There's always a press conference and the head coaches of both teams have to go and talk and answer questions of the press Somebody asked coach her Edwards. Are you going to lose on purpose? Right so that you can get a better draft pick next year and his response was famous This is legendary You might hear people play sports people more so than nerd people because you realize sports people are just as nerdy as all It's sports nerd. Yeah, a sports nerd. They memorize every step of every character that they follow in this competitive game The player You play to win the game Just play it just play it The thing about sports You play to win and I don't care if you don't have any wins. You go play to win. You start killing me. It doesn't matter Then it's time you get out This whole conversation bothers me Lot of reasons why you want to play to win and we'll get into all of that So, let's start we have to warn you. This is a dangerous panel. This is a danger zone. Oh wait, they just watched archer Okay, anyway, that's why that was in my head So we're gonna take you to a scary place in gaming if you stay in this room and do what we say You're gonna have some problems in the rest of your life So pretty war yeah, the problems pretty much are that some of the games that you are gonna play are not gonna be fun Anymore right if you just know how to win a game and so to all your friends the game can sometimes become really really boring There are three fundamental traits or superpowers that you're going to acquire, but they are there with great responsibility comes great air hockey So the air hockey problem is very particular to games like air hockey games where there's a high-skill cat But most people do not play them competitively. You will never see these games in the Omega Many of you might play air hockey, you know when you're at an arcade you're at a bar and you're okay at it But you're not good very few people practice air hockey So if you go up to someone say hey, why don't I play air hockey sure and you play and it's a ton of fun But we play our hockey a lot. We're really into air we see an air hockey table. That's actually a good one photon, right? It's got to be a regulation table. Yeah, if we see an air hockey table, it's down. It is on So the trouble here is that if you start to be good at games your friends won't play with you anymore If you people are like good at a fighting game and they have friends who aren't good at the fighting game And they just refuse to play with you right because you'll just beat them They won't even get a single hidden. That's just not fun for them. Yeah, right? It's lonely at the top You also reach this problem Where if you start to be good at games, you'll be better than everyone you play with in your hometown But you won't be pro so you'll be good enough to beat all your friends in soul caliber But you can't win a tournament at PAX so you have almost no one to play games with So be warned. This is the path you're going down The bevegan odor very schlagen z problem So this might be an apocryphal tale But there's a German game designer who was asked in an interview at one point your games are very popular But a problem we see is that it takes a long time people spend forever on their turn analyzing every possible outcome Yeah, the famous game is a choir if you ever played a choir if you sit down and calculate every possible decision In which one gets you the most points in a choir it takes forever It's but you know unless you have a calculator, but even then it takes a while But if you do that you're gonna win, right? The best chance of winning his response was well, I'm doing a terrible accent and I'm translating from German from a story That might not even be real What we do is we sit around and we start to chat move or I will hit you move or I will hit you And if it does not move we hit them they learn their lesson So what will happen to you is one you will start taking your turn especially in board games like that You'll know exactly what to do every turn and all your dumb-ass friends are gonna sit there forever being like This happens to us a lot when we go to like board game night and we're playing with somewhat strangers or acquaintances And they're not like our close friends who play board games like crazy And like I'll know exactly I'll just be thinking during everyone else's turn What I'm gonna do on my turn it gets to my turn and I'm like click click click click click click done But eventually it goes around the table and every time it gets to the one guy's turn usually to your right It's like your way you're like I'll take a nap. Oh, it's my turn Now the tricky part is that there's a lot of reasons for this and the biggest one is that a lot of decisions in games That you think matter don't matter at all They're entirely arbitrary and if you figure out games You'll know when a decision doesn't matter and you won't worry about it. You'll just pick one probably randomly But you can tell then you'll see the people who haven't quite figured this out They'll be sitting there agonizing over whether to throw paper or rock Agonizing well, he might throw scissors So I think I should the worst problem is that you're going to see through the matrix settlers of the time Done game. We've seen through it. We've solved it We'll tell you how to solve it as an example of how this works almost all the board games I own I can't play anymore because I know the solution. I know exactly how to win what's going on There's no fun in it anymore. I don't even make any decisions So We really have to lay a few ground rules to before we really get into this We have to say what these words actually mean, but we're actually talking about the biggest one is game What is a game? I mean patty cake is a game Farmville is a game Yeah, if you look at the dictionary for the word game, right? I mean, you know people always say oh, I hate to use the old dictionary cliche But what's wrong with the dictionary cliche is a definition of a word right there it is. It's true. Go for it I think it's pretty obvious which one we're going for here. So physics, right? That's such a cheap gag, but I like that picture a lot So if you talk to game designers, they're kind of two or game players There are two definitions of game that have sort of crystallized into what we all agree upon I don't think anyone in this room would agree that you can say a game is either a series of interesting decisions You might say a series of meaningful decisions instead. For example, Candyland. You don't make any decisions I guess do I play Candyland or not? Do I do I cheat or not? And the one we want to focus on a fair competitive test of one or more skills All games test some sort of skill if we're gonna use that definition So we're thinking about games in terms of a competition I'm gonna bang my brain or my fist or my sword or my something against Scott's equivalent And we're going to fight it out. Yeah, some games are just an obvious You know, it's obvious what skill they're testing like, you know running race Well, we're testing our leg strength and lung power and whatever right, but some games like what skill is this game testing? Patience. Patience is often the thing that is tested in many games. For example, Monopoly Now, what about a sport because sports are actually very different from games in a few key areas for example, I can tell you I have a strategy. You want to hear my strategy? You want how to win hockey? Take the little black thing and put it in the goal And keep doing it over and over again But notice how knowing what I'm going to do isn't the only thing that matters actually doing it also matters There's a skill of doing that. Yeah, you know, if you have a board game or something like that Just knowing what you want to do. Oh, it's a board game. I want to put the biscuit in the basket Boom put the busy mask. I win But if it's a sport, you actually have to be able to do it There's some other physical difficulty. It could even be a small difficulty, right? You know, I consider like RTS isn't pretty much any even a platforming game to be a sport because there is some physical element You might know you want and Mario just doesn't jump over the pit Oh, you didn't jump over the pit because you didn't physically do it correctly your timing your reaction time your physical strength Something about you and your body was not up to speed and that makes it a sport I mean in Dance Dance Revolution, I am making meaningful decisions. I'm saying if there's a left arrow I'm gonna step on that left one. I'm gonna step on the right one I'm gonna do what the game is telling me to do There are meaningful decisions in that regard and that they actually if I don't do them I lose the game but they're not Interesting decisions because I think we all can identify that an arrow pointing left means left Well, you might want to step on the left arrow with the right foot That's a pretty advanced tactic But the key here is that the execution matters now people might be saying, you know, oh, there's the element of physicality That's what you're defining as a sport. So I want to skip a little bit chess Chess is not a sport because if I am quadriplegic, I can still play chess I can say what my move is and someone else will move it a Robot can play chess and the tender to the robot will move the pieces for or tell it where the pieces are on the board You don't you don't get more points in chess by moving the piece faster Or you know movie or throwing the piece and having it land exactly on the right spot I'm just boxing on the other hand as that's a sport Now one could argue that it is a sport because I still have to execute the calculations in my brain And you know our constructs and causality and all that but that's a stupid argument Pretty much the brain is the one muscle that is exempted from the sport definition because otherwise everything comes down to Syloxism and is meaningless counter strike is also a sport because there is strategy tactic involved But what really matters what really determines who wins and you loses is the skill at the specific test The test here is can I click on people's heads and avoid being clicked on my own head? And can I do it faster than everyone else and we can tell you how to win sports There's a very easy formula to winning all sports play them a lot Yeah practice. Yeah, I mean, you know, there's no way you know If the human body right if you want to move the fastest as you can move you need to have muscle memory to where you're not even thinking Right if you play DDR or any sort of rhythm game right when you're first starting out You're actually thinking consciously push this button then strum the thing step on the arrow But as soon as you do it for a few minutes or maybe you know depending on how good you are right or your natural talent is Eventually, you're not consciously thinking the arrows or the symbols on the screen are just controlling your body Your muscles have the memory and you can you can delegate all of that thinking to some subconscious part of your brain It just arrows come in feet move and then that allows you to use your brain to think about things on a higher level Right, so for example when if you're playing baseball, right and you want to be really good at it You know if you actually have to think about your swing And you just don't have it memorized in your muscles Then you're thinking about your swing and because you're thinking about your swing You're not thinking about other things like should I run to second base, you know Where's the you know, what's the strategy here? Bunch right, but as soon as you can have your swing in your muscle memory Then you can think about these strategies in the higher level, you know Do I want to get a sacrifice fly out to the left field and that would you know Elevates you to the next level of gameplay. So if you want to be better than me at Counter-Strike start playing Counter-Strike 10 years ago It's like Street Fighter 2 right, it's like okay, you can do if you can just think okay Here's how to do this combo light light medium heavy attack, right if you actually have to think about the combo Then you have to you know, you're not thinking about which combo was the combo I want to do right now So there are board games as a kind of quick aside that are sports You might have seen us playing jungle speed throughout this convention. These are sports more so than games There are tons of board game sports But if you want to win at games you have to identify and a lot of people don't think about this whether or not What you're playing is a sport or a game and act accordingly if you know It's a sport if you know that I have to flick little things and then have mooses or elk run across them You better practice your flicking right so lesson number one if you want to win at sports practice So we're not going to talk about sports anymore We're going to use board games as examples throughout most of this because they really the mechanics are there Physical and elegant so that no matter even if you're not good at math you can see the entire game You can manipulate it directly you can hold the entire abstraction of the game in your mind So they're kind of the perfect way to teach how to win at all games I have to go over a few more definitions Griefing is simply when you are playing to get something other than what the rest of the players are trying to get You're not playing to win the game if you ever play a game with anyone and you aren't trying to win You are griefing them just as badly as if I stab my teammate in the back and Counter-Strike. Yeah I mean there's a thing called utility right utility is what you want in the game It's the carrot right Counter-Strike you want your utility is to either you know Let's say it's a DE math you either want to bomb the other guys or kill them all right If you're trying to do something else like I don't want to do that. I want to jump on every crate once Find the glitch and go up above and walk on the sky So what we have here is a mismatch of utility I'm trying to win the game like Herm Edwards tells me to Scott's dicking around my games no longer fun All griefing just comes down to disparate utility now some games are designed better than others For example people grief and Counter-Strike because they're losing and they're bored But that's a topic for another discussion Another very important concept before we get into the actual strategies of how to beat all these games is that you have to Realize all games in the world every possible game There is no exception to this breaks down to one of these three in the end Every game is how they're solvable completely random are entirely arbitrary. I remember solvable doesn't mean solved Right solvable breaks down into solved and unsolved right so there are games that are yes They are solvable games, but we have not yet solved them for example checkers We talked about this in the panel. We just did but many people weren't there for that checkers is a solved game relatively There's a weak solution to checkers in that if from a starting position Both players can force the game to a draw no matter what the game is solved and eventually we will solve it completely And prove that mathematically someday chess will be solved the games don't hide anything There's a limited finite number of possible states in the game. So the game can be solved There's an absolute perfect way to play chess checkers go. Oh, she take tacto any game like that Random Yahtzee is a random game at its core. You are making decisions. I mean I have to decide all right I rolled four sixes should I go for that fifth six you could take the 24 or you can go Oh, you mean if you have another role you're gonna go for the Yahtzee But do you score in the four of a kind which is a lot of points or do you score in the four sixes up top? Now if you're smart at all, it's obvious what to do in Yahtzee You're never sitting there thinking. Oh, should I take the Yahtzee or should I put it all in chance? So The game of Yahtzee comes down to complete randomness among skilled players now if you're playing with unskilled players They're going to lose a lot because they're not playing the game perfectly But once you are playing the game as perfectly as the decisions the game affords to you allow The core of the game is all that matters and in Yahtzee and Monopoly the game is 100% random once everybody's on the same page Settlers of Catan is a random goddamn game Once everybody is playing settlers the way that we will tell you how to play it, right? The winner will be determined by the role of the dice now because in settlers every turn you're rolling to that dice to determine Where resources come out maybe one guy is unlucky and he's on the 12 somehow, right? Well 12 could come up like three or four times if it happens that guy's the win All right, just because nobody else is going on the 12 because they playing the odds They're playing you know to give themselves the best possible chance of winning, right? But everyone has the best possible chance of winning you all have the same chance and then randomly one winner will be determined So we've played settlers. I don't know hundreds of times for a couple of years This is our first tournament board game We played it a lot and we really liked it and we got really really good at it We kind of figured the game out and I entered a national settlers of Catan tournament Yeah, Ubercon like five or six something years ago I'm an old man and at this convention I joined the tournament and I win the first round Handily when the second round handily we're in the quarter-finals everyone now is smart just like us We all sit down. They all know settlers every single game There were four quarter-final games ended with one person winning with ten points and every other person having nine and a guaranteed 10th point on their turn There is no way any one of those players could have made the game go differently Other than by sabotaging the game by not trying to win and losing on purpose or do a gigaboo Jones We'll get to jiggaboo Jones in a little bit jiggaboo Jones is not technically cheating Arbitrary games Paper rock scissors is an arbitrary game. I can try to be psychological. I know Scott motherfucking loves scissors Nobody plays like that now there isn't interesting algorithm out there. It's a tic-tac-toe It's online where you can play against it It'll figure out how non random you are as a human and start to beat you But that's a separate thing this game is entirely arbitrary No strategy paper rock or scissors is better than any other strategy other than the dick punch followed by running away with this wall But that's meta play So there's no way for me to say my choice of rock is better or worse than my choice of paper or scissors So as a result my decision is meaningless You'll see players like we said in the beginning who haven't figured this out in much more complex games agonizing over completely meaningless and arbitrary decisions in games much like our friend physics He chose poorly So we're gonna tell you how to win some goddamn games We're going to tell you exactly how to win games and we have a name for each one of these strategies the first one The shortest path this might seem obvious, but people don't do it if you play a brand new game You've never played before especially a very complicated German board game. There's a lot going on. It's got resources. It's got money It's got buildings. It's got you know little cards. It's got little animals It's got all sorts of stuff going on right? You're like, ooh, I want to play with all this stuff Oh, look at the sheet. No, look at what gets victory points if victory points is what you use to win Kaleus is a game where you acquire victory points So if you look at the board, there's all these buildings you can build and all this stuff But that whole top section is the castle and if you put stuff in the castle victory points come out That's like the basic way to get victory points. Now there may or may not be better ways to get victory points I know one guy once beat us with the jeweler. It was like an extension card He was able to get gold and diamonds into the jeweler and he kicked our asses But there is an obvious direct way to win So if you're playing the game for the first time and all your friends are playing for the first time They don't realize that the shortest path is the way They're gonna play with all the stupid crap all over the board and you just do the cheap Obvious thing that won't work necessarily against skilled players, but we're guaranteed against unskilled players This is what you want to do when you bust open a game for the first time look for the victory condition Victory points usually in German game like this and go for that as hard as you possibly can What's the easiest way to get victory points do it over and over and over and over again? Yes, I win Puerto Rico is a good example of this Puerto Rico is a game where you get buildings all these victory points But there's a captain and it lets you take goods and turn them into victory points If you just rush the captain and captain captain captain captain Craftsman to get goods captain to sell the goods craftsman captain craftsman Yeah, you have to do the do the little machine crank the smallest machine that prints out that the most A lot of smart people like you will think oh, but everyone knows that so they're gonna obviously do the more advanced strategy There's more likely to pay out in other situations others people will do the same strategy as me and dilute my victory points Nobody does that out there Try the thing Kayla's room or trying to win those people out there So play the game Kayla's with your friends teach them the game and just go in that goddamn castle and ignore the whole rest of the Now cheap is not cheating right so so what is cheap right cheap is something that's usually a game design flaw Right because when we look at games we tend to think the most powerful strategy, right? The thing that does that helps you win the most should be very hard to do right if the card That is worth 10 victory points cost one gold and the card that cost one It's worth one victory point is ten gold that's messed up because no one's ever gonna buy The you know to cheat the expensive card before a few points right so a cheap thing is when someone screws up in game design And there's a very easy strategy something that is incredibly simple to do and incredibly obvious that is incredibly powerful Right as it goes to more powerful than weaker things like if M. Bison's jab did more damage than the incredibly complicated ultra attack That would be cheap and it would be a problem So for example staking now in a board game you have rules the rules of the game to find the game as long as you Not violate the rules you are not cheating it is not cheating to snake because in a video game The rules of the game are the code and the code allows snaking if there is ever a game That has a really cheap strategy the game is fundamentally broken and if you are playing to win You should be using that strategy as much as you can The biggest stick so if you're playing game and You like this is a good example Carcassonne and I have about an 80 90% win rate at this game It is nuts, but basically the way it works right is you know We talked already about you know the the obvious strategy get victory points, right? But some games like Carcassonne also have ways to take away victory points from other players So not obviously not obviously or prevent other players from getting victory points to make it more difficult for them to get victory Points right so when you're we have to do is you to think about a little bit of math Right this move gets me five points This move gets me three points, but it takes away six from the second best player Which makes it actually a total of nine points So that's the better move because you don't care about the guy in last place is not gonna beat you anyway Don't spend your time taking him So to win Carcassonne Every the game is simple your draw card a tile you play it and everyone draws one place where you're very little Like your input to the game is very small one tile at a time So if there's a tile that gets you a ton of points Use that tile to get a ton of points if you can't get more than one point with that tile And you have nothing better to do with it find the biggest way to Royally dick the person who's most likely to beat you in the game If he's about to build a ten-point castle and you put a road pointing into it And now he never finishes that ten-point castle You've just probably taken five points away from him There was no way you were gonna get five points is making your road one space longer If he's got a giant city you stick the citadel in that it doubles the points But it removes the condition of points if you don't finish the city and then just make sure he never finishes that city The king maker and the king breaker. These are very important strategies in games So in El Grande this is a game It's actually a great game for learning kind of all these techniques because it has almost every German style of game Mechanic in it. It's an old game. You can get it for like 40 bucks They have a box all these in El Grande It's kind of the game theory kernel blotto game You're distributing your dudes all over this board and every province has points like the first place guy in that province Gets like five points in Valencia. Yeah, second place gets maybe four points and third place gets like one point Every province is different now in this game the way it works is to get control of a province You usually have to kind of work with someone else anytime. You're getting points. You're also giving points to someone else somehow So what you want to do is find the dumbest guy at the table and give him all the other points So if me and Scott and two doofuses not to mean that any of you are doofuses I was pointing that guy back there So us and two doofuses Scott's probably gonna beat me. I know he's the best player at the table other than me So what I'm gonna do is say rather than having a 25% chance of winning in an absolute world Maybe have a slightly higher chance because I know I'm better than everyone else I will split my points between myself and the two doofuses to deny Scott points So I'll go in with those doofuses all the time. Yeah doofus I gave you 20 points and I got 10 for myself and Scott got nothing It's usually in a lot of games, you know There'll be a move available to you that gives you like 10 points and it gives no one else any points And that's a great move, but it's pretty hard to pull off that move. It's expensive because the game doesn't have a cheap mechanic It's not broken right, but there's usually a lot of moves that are available That's like three for me and three for another guy or four for me and three for another guy So you just have to choose that other guy and that other guy needs to be the worst guy at the table Because giving the last place guy three points. It doesn't really hurt you giving the second place guy three points kills you You can't do that. So what you do is you make a king you king make yeah, you're not becoming the king You're making some doofus the king. You're the vizier, right? So you take that crappy guy you make him get second place But you get first place and he's totally buddy-buddying with you without even realizing it Since he's doing so well He doesn't even think he's being a doofus to go back to carcassone because it's a game That I think more people have played if you want a king make you and like two other says a pie player game You go in with two other people and make a gigantic motherfucking city like something because on your own you can't make a huge It is so save me and two other guys make a gigantic city we get like 40 points out of that We have not gained 40 points in the game Well, you effectively done is removed 40 points from the two other people who weren't in the city So now pretty much you too that cooperated on the city are pretty much the winners And everyone else is the losers now you make to make sure that you team up with somebody else That wasn't that other guy in the castle with you so that he you know falls behind King making is eliminating someone from the game usually the person who's going to be you otherwise King breaking is just fairly obvious, but no one ever does it if someone else is winning and it's not you Attack only one attack him Everyone go see attack the gas station This is our aside attack the gas station is a movie It's Korean about a bunch of like thugs like you know 16 to 20 year old punk kid thugs Who go and rob a gas station and then they go and eat some noodles and they're bored and like what should we now attack the gas station again? So they go and rob the same gas station again And there's one dude There's street fights in this movie like five or six times and this one guy has a philosophy if there's ever a fight No matter how many people I'm fighting I pick one guy and I attack only one guy Because if you try to fight a mob of guys right maybe they'll hold you down Maybe you'll do a little bit of damage to all of them if you pick just one You're setting that guy at a hospital big time and now everyone is afraid of you A group of people comes at you right and you're like attack only one And I hope I'm not the one and they all run away It's kind of like Sean Connery in the back of a prison in the prison truck in the family business Where he you know he looks around who's the biggest baddest dude in this room and head bucks him and knocks him out Same exact thing so if you ever go to prison Right this is the idea that the sip the order of play which usually in games is clockwise If it's a weird game like a Steve Jackson game is counterclockwise Sometimes it's random, but whatever the turn order is matters a lot writing tic-tac-toe. You want to be x you don't want to be old So we played El Grande a lot That was our first real game after settlers of the time and we started to figure the game out We started to figure out that there's this state that the game gets into like four rounds before the end That determines who wins absolutely So everyone jockeyed to make the first move four rounds before the end and then we didn't even need to play after that So people realize that because you bid around clockwise Sitting to the left of a dumbass gave you a much better chance of pulling that off Now in many games like Puerto Rico the example is that play goes around clockwise You never want to be doing the same thing as the person who goes before you because he will always front run you If I'm trying to craft in captain and scops trying to craft in captain like craft Captain so I get the benefits of his crafting and he doesn't get it because I got the captain he did all the work I get the payoff Now in other games you want to look at like say there's multiple paths to victory like you can go for the gold Or you can go for the brick and wood if someone else is already going for the brick and wood You don't want to do the same thing they're doing even if they don't go before you necessarily Because if two people are competing for the same scarce resources neither one of you is more likely to win It's like you're our great if one guy's doing the coal power plant Don't do the coal power plant You got to do the oil or the trash or something else because otherwise he's gonna buy up all the coal And it's gonna become really expensive So you have to pay attention to who goes before you who goes after you you have to decide What is my strategy you have to you want to pick a strategy that either no one else is doing or that you can front Run the doofus to your left on You also when you're about to sit down to play a game you want to fight for you know musical chairs situation Yeah, El Grande got bad I got to the point where I'd sit down and Scott would get up and move that I would get the move Scott would get up and move If you have to if everyone is smart start determining seating randomly or play a different game This is also why it read any German game people forget to read the wholeness of the book in every German game It says how to determine the starting player It'll say something like the youngest player the oldest player the Most recently You should use those rules because otherwise someone smart who realizes that if I go first in this game I'm more likely to win if I go last in this game I'm more likely to win they'll just say oh you guys can go first So what you should do if you're playing Puerto Rico three player always the last We're I'm pretty sure that if everyone plays optimally the third player in a three player game of Puerto Rico Will always win Always that corn helps a whole lot. We played Puerto Rico like a hundred two hundred three hundred times over the course of one summer five or six times every damn day No one ever won unless they were the third-place player Branksmanship so this isn't the greatest game Chrononops, okay, so in this game is something that can happen with the paradoxes right if there's too many paradoxes like 13 paradoxes The whole game will end in a horrible horrible universe destroying fashion and everybody loses So everyone's score at winning is zero as opposed to I win my score is one and everyone else's score is zero So say you're one away from the paradox that ends the game There's no reason for you to ever fix that because if no one else fixes it you all lose You're no worse off than everyone else if you fix it You're denying yourself points making sure that you don't win just so some other doofus can win the game Yeah, I mean it costs an action it costs resources to fix this problem That's a shared problem among everybody right it's the tragedy of the comments, right? Oh, man, you know this park is really dirty the park belongs to everybody if I clean up the park I'm spending my hour of you know time cleaning it I could spend my hour in the park you get to spend his hour enjoying the clean park that I cleaned up, right? So I mean in real life that doesn't work, right? You want to have a clean park It's good to clean but this is a way You don't want to be the guy who spent your in-game money to fix something that's a problem for everybody Because then you're just now behind by X dollars and you're gonna lose you don't care if this universe gets destroyed You don't care about that at all you care about winning that game Now this applies brings me ship applies to a lot of systems for example Let's say Scott's going to win on his turn like when it is this turn he wins unless someone blocks one action in the game I'm putting their dude there If say me and one other person of the last players to go I will never block Scott from winning I will force the other guy to do it because if I say no, I'm not gonna do it He is obligated to or the game ends and he loses He will probably do it because otherwise Scott's guaranteed the win the game ends right then and I have now not had to do it So I'm more likely to win so if ever, you know, you're playing in your group and someone says something like we got to stop For him or he's totally gonna win let somebody else do it in fact point at someone else and say if you don't do it We're gonna lose cuz fuck you. I'm not doing anything Tell me exact move to be like you on your turn you're gonna put your thing there Otherwise, it's a hundred percent sure look this and this and this and this room will win I'm definitely not going to do it. You must do it Let him know because otherwise they might be not if they're not too smart They might not realize this is going on. It's basically a cold war. You've got nukes. So you don't care He's like all right. I'll lose bring it So psychology Reading you know reading faces reading minds. This is actually very important in games Now if you are smart players, don't just don't reveal anything Don't you know have a poker face wear sunglasses wear a ski mask do whatever you There's a game Tigger's new freadies It's one of Puerto Rico is the best German game ever designed Tigger's new freadies is my favorite game ever and in this game You have tiles of four different colors in that little screen the tiles are hidden behind your shield No one is supposed to know what tiles you have or how many for a while I was winning an inordinate number of these games against Scott and the reason for this was I would hold My tiles like a hand like a poker hand. So they were just in a little hand I kept a little pile behind my shoe I noticed that every time Scott had three or more if the color came up He would he would look down and he would go like this from the top and grab that pile So I knew whenever he came in from the top He had three or more of that tile most of the time if he came in from the side. He had two or less It worked really really well Scott learned his lesson and you know He was able to avoid that but your friends are not as smart as you because you now know watch your friends You're playing straight he go just watch what they said up They're gonna put the flag down first. Yeah, or like I'm playing ticket to ride, right? So I'm playing and I'm like hi is he gonna be I'm worried like I want to build those tracks But it's gonna take me two turns if he gonna build those tracks there first Look at the dude's eyes look at where they're aiming on the board people look at the spot They're gonna make a move so if you can look at them and look at the board and see where they're looking That's what they're making a move. So it's like oh, he's looking at California. I'm safe. I can wait a turn to go to New York Oh, shit. He's looking at New York make the move now El Grande was where we really figure this out because it has secret spinners That's the mechanic where everyone will pick a province on a secret spinner and reveal them simultaneously So because the province all have names look at everyone's eyes and they'll be looking at it And they'll be like and they'll zoom in because they can't read it because everyone has bad eyes. Oh, Valencia And you'll know all right. They're gonna go to Valencia There's actually one game it's not a great game But it does have some cool stuff in it that actually solves this problem fury of Dracula is a game where Dracula is hidden movement He's secretly moving around Europe right and the thing is you would think Dracula will look at the map And then you'll know where Dracula is because he's looking at where he is because he wants to know where you can go The game actually comes with a separate little mini map that Dracula can look at like this So that Dracula will not reveal his position by looking at the big map We have tried there's almost no way to figure out where someone's looking So if you're attracted to make sure you're looking at the little map never look at the big one ever Also, you know do tricks say the name of a province say the name of a strategy Try to draw out what the other people are doing most people are not that good at this and will totally reveal What's going on and you also you got to play the double-up game, right? If you if you're gonna go to New York look at California a whole bunch Is someone else to be like oh, he's definitely going over there once they see you look in there And they just like and then make your move over to the right now more importantly And this is probably one of the biggest pieces vices we can give you whenever a decision is random or arbitrary Actually act randomly Citadel is an arbitrary game. It's a poison in the Cup game, but it's really fun I'd recommend it, but the way the game works is you have a set of Cards that determine the role you're going to take and there's a lot of psychology as to who's gonna take what role For example, there's a role that you build a whole bunch of crap So if someone has a whole bunch of money, they really want that role There's another role that steals all the money from whoever you want meaning the guy who has a whole bunch of money He's gonna build a whole bunch of crap So if I play the thief on and I send what I play the thief I say I'm robbing the builder if Scott had taken the builder. I get all his money. He can't build anything So people would you could never take the good cards because people knew you're gonna take the good cards It was just a poison cup situation. So Scott does a very meta play thing one game. He's holding up the cards He puts them down shuffles them cuts the deck picks one randomly doesn't even look at it and pass them to the left We never played Citadels again. They take the merchant or is he playing it safe taking the magician? I don't even know what I think The Rock Paper Scissors is an arbitrary you should take randomly right and that way no one be able to guess what you're doing And you have the best odds of winning now in this game Scott did something that is so close to cheating So what I did is I realized these morons weren't shuffling the cards So I fanned out the cards in my hand and I know they're numbered so it's one to three or six seven eight I selected one right answer to me the month and I handed them to the next guy and I go he fanned him out He took the third one shuffling either. So it's like he took the six one That one round that one game Scott was like Neo in the matrix and the rest You just took the thief Pete you just took the merchants like what that's specific trick I guarantee will work on all your friends So by Citadels and you play Citadel shuffle the cards before you draw even if you're not drawing randomly just shuffle them up Behind your back if you have to so meta play now We're using the colloquial definition not the game theory definition like we're using in the previous panel But I'm gonna use the same example. I use I'm sorry to the people who were there So we're gonna play chicken, you know the game where we're both in cars We're gonna drive at each other at a hundred miles an hour if I swerve and Scott doesn't he wins Oh, yeah, if he swerves and I don't I win if we both swerve we both lose if neither one of us works We both die So there is a way to win this game. So we're sitting there. We're ready to go I look at Scott. He looks at me. I rip my steering wheel off and throw it out of my car So so the real game of chicken is who rips out their steering column first I got a secret wrench hidden under the dash So then it comes down to the fact to think about that the game by his decision matrix was Swerve or not swerve and there were you know multiple possible outcomes his decisions now are swerve or die Into not sort of just like we were talking about you know, the Blocking of the other guy, you know is gonna win, right? I know that he is not going to prevent our friend from winning the game Therefore it's up to me because he threw a steering wheel up You can do this in any game where you pick roles or cards You can take a card and say I'm playing this one to throw it down and that's it Like I'm not going back. There's no way for me to undo my move You can also do it very subtly and very cheaply in games like Vinci which was remade as small world It only works over the course of multiple games. Yes And this is cheap and meta, but it's worked really well for me to work really well for you You play small world or Vinci once you decline your empire Then you get a new empire and you bust out onto the board usually on top of someone else's business So every time that would happen someone's about to come on I turn to them and say if you take so much as one of my properties I will spend my entire next round utterly fucking you And do it even if it costs you a whole lot do it anyway If you make a threat follow through on the threat now Maybe that would cost you so much that you wouldn't win Okay, but we told you to play to win the thing is in the next game They know that you are serious and you are not lying when you make these threats And then they won't they won't go after your declining empire because it'll make them lose and then you'll keep the declining empire And then you come on top of them anyway And you know you'll get double you can all you can also use psychology here in a great way Just like I people I have a reputation among our friends of just lying about 50% of the time So we'll be letting juggles feed and I'll just be like colors does match or she can grab it And there's no matches, but sometimes there is a match and I say that and people who had a match look at it like And then I just grabbed the top like it You know just be a jerk all the time So we promise we teach you how to beat two games very specifically and if we have time maybe we'll talk about another game But the first one we want to do is strategic We can tell you exactly Does anyone not familiar with the game of strategic a few people alright So basically they're both the actual board so there are some certain you know among players who aren't that great at This game we haven't solved it. There's a lot of strategies and tactics that don't exist in higher levels of play For example when I play against doofuses Say they're next to my bomb. I'll pick up my bomb and go like I'm gonna attack him and I'll change my mind and put it back down Now a smart player there weren't won't work against me if you didn't move it you didn't move See when I play the number one thing you gotta do in Stratigo is never ever ever attack anything that has not moved If you know it is moved then it is not a bomb and you can attack it if it is not moved Absolutely do not attack it whatsoever under any circumstance. There's no reason to ever ever do that now secondarily You never ever put your one piece your most powerful guy next to a piece you have not identified Because it might be a spy. There's no reason to ever risk your one piece So never ever ever ever put him next to a piece you know what it is It seems simple people don't think of these you lose your one piece the other guy still has it game over Let's talk about setup. Most people put all their scouts in the front. That seems like an obvious strategy That's the worst thing you can do because they're guaranteed to die against anything You want to save your scouts in the second rows that they can go and after you clear out the guys in the front lines You can see what's in the back if that's how you find the bottom or more importantly That's how you find the spy you have a line of scouts in the third row Just waiting because they can attack across the whole board anytime an unidentified piece comes out moving forward Hit it with the spy sorry You would not believe how many spies I have caught by that and once you have taken out the other guys spy You're basically visible because once the other guy knows where your one is and your one isn't dead because you didn't put it next to any unknown Pieces right so you once you're one once they know where it is They'll start trying to move the spy towards it especially with far away So what do you put in the front row? Maybe a bomb but most importantly you put in the front row all your goons I mean your one piece is two pieces three pieces are important We're talking about the five six seven guys every piece that isn't a one two three scouts fire minor is Completely worthless So put the highest number or lowest number doing what's that you have the best of your goons all in the front And your friends you're playing with are you just ram all their scouts against it and lose all their scouts that works almost all the time? Yeah, the other thing is like you know, okay So you got these pretty much three columns because there's two lakes right? So it's like where you got to send a big army up one or two with the columns You know hide the bomb somewhere back there right first of all hide the bomb randomly right that way there's no way the guy can Psychologically figure it out don't like when you're setting up the board right some people just they set it up like one piece at a time They're probably gonna put the flag first. So watch Here's my one piece then they put all the bombs like spread out and then they fill in all the pieces They put toward the end are their goons because you'll see I'm just kind of putting them all over the place kind of semi-arbitrarily You know that's where the goons are watch them set up and place your pieces deliberately and pretty randomly Now we're gonna teach you how to beat on the skilled players because that's what you're interested in no one out There is really good as strategic. I call this bombs and bullshit Put your flag in the bottom left corner I say usually bottom left because people read left to right usually so as a result They expect people to play left to right So you're gonna play to the fact that they have these sort of preconceived notions about the way the game is gonna go Just put your flags and bombs around it put all your best guys on your left side in front of the bomb You're one you two you're three all your minors everything the entire rest of your board is bombs and bullshit On your turn just move all your big guys up around the left in a big circle Just come up there we go all the way up around and if he comes in this way just come back and stop him There's no way he'll get to your flag all your best pieces are blocking it This will beat any eight-year-old kid in the world and let me know You haven't put it there so To be fair They made the million dollar back every great car that was legal to play and they go down the rules of the panacea What would live is rock on they play that Other people You shouldn't be making decisions there for me for a There's for you very obviously I say He has to move a piece As the moon You know it's not a bond, don't you? And also, messed it up. I'm not going to forget that that's just one, that's just three, that's just five. Every PCC you've got to remember, the exact duration of the game is very important. If there are numbers there, remember them. No cards. No cards. It's not cheap. It's just really, really cheap. And also, right, so you need to actually remember where the one is, where the two is. But at the same time, make the other back for that clean showroom. Same few turns, move to the one and the two and I'll say to you like, why don't you move my monkey sack? You're going to move the three, right? It doesn't matter. Move your guys in a big circle for a while for no reason. It's fine, because I know where each one is. Or when you're going to look up for a minute, take your turn. Now he is, he is legitimately going to say, what did you move? He says no, what did you move? He said you got to go backwards. He will probably go back to what that means to us. Because of his weird psychology, you actually didn't see him move. Uh, that's what I'm going to say about this. See, if you knew about this bullshit strategy, you wouldn't be on the same level outside of your zone. And if someone else is doing this bullshit strategy, you're starting to get to access yourself. And it's over again. You'll broke yourself then when you broke your own decisions in the course of the week.