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Comment by tylervigen

10 hours ago

I have never played it, but I could imagine a scoring mechanism that would make it interesting, and perhaps is implied by the rules:

The score value starts at 1. Every additional "check" multiplies the score value by 2 (so 2, 4, 8, 16...). The first player to say "checkmate" receives the score. Track your summed score between games; the player with the highest overall score at any given time is "winning."

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tylervigen

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zeroonetwothree  9 hours ago

Isn't the optimal strategy just to say "checkmate" immediately? That dominates anything else.

  • bee_rider  7 hours ago

    I think to have any chance of making this work, you’d need to have a community of players in a tournament. Everybody gets to issue some number of challenges, and the winner is the person who accumulates the most points over the course of the tournament. I think you should only get points based on the length of games you win.

    Then the game at least has a chance to develop some mechanics. Players who delayed longer have a chance at winning more points. They also might be challenged more…