Sunday, October 28, 2018

I need to find some more interesting positions

I haven't posted for a few months; I'm not playing as much and haven't  noticed any interesting positions in time to post them.

So this is another illustration of a very basic point. Maybe I have posted too many of this sort of thing already -- it's not deep at all, though I'll admit I've sometimes blown it when I was working through a backlog of games and moving too quickly.

What should r. do to maximize his chance of victory?

.




Thursday, August 30, 2018

Buttonmen 101

I have 3 choices. What attack gives me the best chance of winning? Or should I go for the draw?




Tuesday, August 7, 2018

not hard, but illustrative


AD has six possible attacks here -- either of my buttons may be taken by either of his dice, or he may boom attack either of my dice.  He's likely to win in any case, but which attacks give the biggest guarantee? [as if often the case, it's not hard to do the explicit math, but this is a frequent enough sort of occurence that it's worth developing the right intuition.]




Wednesday, July 25, 2018

did I do this right?


I think this would have been a much better puzzle if I had taken the screenshot BEFORE capturing, but I didn't think of doing it until after.

First question: Does Hubbub have any chance of  winning this game? If so, what would be his best move to optimize that chance?

Second question: I took the 12-sided die with my X-swing (which had a value of 4 before I rerolled it). Had I instead taken the turbo-swing, what would Hubbub's chance of winning have been?




Sunday, July 15, 2018

Thursday, June 14, 2018

simple, but I did have to stop for a moment

I have only two choices here. We can -- and should -- do the math, but which one do you think is better?




Friday, February 23, 2018

Max vs Bluff, redux



Over 10 years ago (!), I wrote a post about Max vs. Bluff  -- but I no longer remember my reasoning and  the links to the old website don't work anymore so I can't look back at game 604-thousand and something to see what I set my swing die [actually, as I recall, we didn't get detailed game history so maybe I couldn't tell anyway unless I put something in the comments]

I've worked out some possible answers now, but am not as confident as I sounded back then when I was thinking a lot more about Max. Reading another old Max post helps a little

And playing a few new games is refreshing my memory.

Here's a puzzle from a CURRENT game of Max vs. Bluff


It's Bosco312's turn. What's the best capture? there might be more than one reasonably good answer, but there are definitely some significantly less good answers.

Monday, February 19, 2018

Null puzzle


I'm up by 4 sides, but I'm very vulernable to a speed attack. But that only gives irilyth a tie. On the other hand, if he does a non-null attack, he could lose if he rolls a 1,2 or 4. Does he have any better options?