Board Games and Card Games

Shall we begin with a fairly cheap one?

Challenge 1: Red to play 4-3.

It’s always tempting, when you don’t roll what you need, to just do something safe and hope for a better roll next time. In this case the safe play would be 8/1. Actually that’s a blunder, and Red’s natural game plan suggests a much better move.

What is Red’s plan, given that it must be to win by racing, priming, or attacking? Well we can discount racing, down 34 pips. As for attacking, that might come about in the course of things, since Red has one man back and cannot anchor. Red could commit to an attacking plan right off the bat with 7/3* 7/4, hoping that White won’t roll the 3.

Possibly Red could even pick up the other blot and close out both! But the offensive asset that stands out is the prime, so Red should think about using it to win.

Now the trouble with the prime is that it’s not good enough to do the job, with White sitting there at the edge just a six away from escaping – he is a favorite to escape in two rolls if left unhindered. Red would like to hit White’s blot off the edge or extend to a six-prime.

The stand-out play is 13/9, 13/10. Red gets hit if White rolls the 6, but a 6 was very strong anyway, so the hit doesn’t cost much. The 69% of the time White doesn’t get hit 6 Red is in great shape, with all aces and 6-5 to make the full prime, and literally every other roll hitting White’s blot.

Note that 13/6 would be very illogical, giving White good 6’s and good 1’s instead of just good 6’s, but it would still be better than 8/1. The last thing you want to do when you are trying to win by priming is to bury a checker out of play where it can’t help.

Challenge 2: Red to play 3-2.

We need not count to see that Red is far ahead in the race. Does this mean that he should ignore other assets that produce priming and attacking chances, and just make the only safe play, which happens to be 9/7, 9/6? Not necessarily.

White is playing the game too. White’s primary game plan is to attack Red’s blot. It is hard to build an effective prime against a single blot, because it constantly threatens to escape, so one must generally take the hits and home board points as the dice present them.

In the course of attacking White might still produce a prime that contains Red’s straggler effectively.