Alea iacta est
23-01-24
If, like me, your Latin is poor-to-non-existent this means "The die is cast". I stumbled across the phrase earlier today, and as it seemed fairly apt to this discussion I couldn't resist the urge for an incredibly pretentious title.
I haven't really made any further progress on 'Cube Whist' aside from playing around with some dice, but I have been thinking a little bit about the mechanics of selecting a die face. As in how we get from 'deciding which die to play' to 'it has been played with a particular face'.
In my initial noodlings I said that it is a normal trick-taking mechanic, but where the rule for deciding who wins a trick is probabilistic. But this is not necessarily true, as it depends a little on how a die's final face is decided. I suggested a version in the initial post, but since then I have been thinking about three potential options:
- Roll as you play it. Subsequent players know which face the die ended up as
- Players select their dice in turn in the usual fashion, but at the end of the trick everyone rolls simultaneously. When a die is played subsequent players will not know what face it ends up as
- When players play their die they manually select a face
Let's briefly look at each in turn.
Option #1
This is the rule as initially envisaged — you roll as you play. The downside of this is that some of the potential 'drama' is removed. Let's say a player has a die with only two options, 1 and 20, and a player following them has two dice to choose from: one with low values (say 2-7) and one with high values (say 18-23). Assuming this following player wishes to head the trick, they will know which die they need to use — if the first player rolls a '1' they can use their low dice, whereas if they roll a '20' they must use the higher one (and hope!).
This of course is not dissimilar to how things work with cards, so it is not necessarily a problem. It gives some extra benefit to players playing last to a trick (as often is the case at cards), which might be something we want.
Option #2
This 'simultaneous rolling' version is the one that actually does have an equivalence to playing cards with a probabilistic winning rule. If we look at the scenario above with this rule, there is a different effect. If the first player plays their '1 or 20' die, then the following player still needs to make a decision - do they risk it and play their low die, hoping the first player's comes up '1', or do they go for the safer option with the high die (but potentially 'wasting' it)? There is potentially an interesting decision to be made.
I like the excitement of this version of things, but I worry that the extra layer of randomness would lead the game to being too chaotic. Replacing cards with dice already adds uncertainty to the game, and I fear that the further uncertainty introduced by simultaneous rolling could lead the game to end up as a pure luck-fest. However I feel that, properly measured, this could potentially increase the scope for strategic play, if not 'scientific' play.
Option #3
This is obviously a slightly different sort of thing — taking the randomness out of the dice, and treating them as though they were cards that can take on a set of discrete possible values. Something similar happens in the game Whist 22 where whoever plays the fool can choose its value to be '0' or '22'. There may well be other games with such a mechanic, but I am not aware of any off-hand.
The clear issue with this is the need to incentivise players in such a way that deciding which face to play is non-trivial. If the game is 'winning tricks is always good' there is rarely (but not never) going to be the need to not play the highest possible face. Exact bidding games can address this partially as some tricks you want to win, and some lose, but this probably just means you are mostly choosing between the highest and lowest faces. Maybe a 'point-trick exact bidding' game (like Differenzler) could allow a more graded choice, allthough I haven't really followed that thought through, and point-trick games translated to dice adds a whole other dimension to consider.
This option, as the least random, has potential for allowing very strategic play, but only with rules carefully crafted so that choosing a face is really an interesting decision, and not just trivial, which to be honest may be beyond my skillset. One nice thing that may aid in this is that with this option, players wouldn't (necessarily) need to reveal which die they played, if they can place a die in such a fashion that only the top face shows. This means that playing a '20', other players wouldn't know if this was, for example, from the die {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 20} or the die {20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25}. I think that is a really fun aspect which is what keeps this in the mix a bit more — I thought about such a thing for the other options, but I cannot see how it is practical for players to roll a die openly (no funny business in choosing a face) and have only the top-most result face visible.
This option probably necessitates dice that have distinct faces - it would be something of a waste having a die like {1, 1, 1, 1, 20, 20} when you could have effectively a coin instead.