CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

I know that random play in Cordial Minuet can be beaten fairly easily. But, I also played a lot of games early on where I picked randomly to test this out. And while I did lose money on those games, wouldn't those games still be considered illegal by the letter of the law? And if so, might Jason be considered culpable for enabling me to play them? I'm not trying to be a wet blanked here, but I just want everyone to understand that if Cordial Minuet ends up in a real legal fight, even the smallest technicalities might end up being used against it.

True, but the question is, if you know the moves the other player is using are not their own, but rather moves generated randomly by a computer, is it legal by the letter of the law to bet money on the outcome? That is a tricky question that I'm not sure has ever really been answered.

Not really. It still makes sense to fold if you don't think you will win, or else you might lose even more than the extra chip you would pay to fold. Calling is still more expensive than folding, because after you call, folding later would be even more expensive. The extra chip just means that you have more motivation to call a raise even when you don't have a clear advantage. And it may often happen that neither player has enough confidence to raise even one chip after a pick. That's the advantage of the simultaneous betting system.

I can't speak for fuwjax, but personally I believe the advantage would be that having the extra chip be the tribute would mean you wouldn't gain any extra chips by pressuring the other player to fold. I think that is required to maintain fairness, or else the winning player would be gaining one more chip than they actually risked by raising if the other player folded.

To play a bit of devil's advocate, even if you do change the game so that every board layout is played from both perspectives, would that really make a difference? A lawyer could still argue that Cordial Minuet has an element of chance that affects the outcome if they could find a way to prove that the first player to get a board layout has an advantage over the second player. Which I think they could in at least some of the cases, because if the first player to get a layout wins a significant number of chips from the other player, they will have leverage when playing the next round with the board layout rotated that the other player didn't get to have when they were playing the board from their original perspective. Lawyers are tricky like that.

But actually, if I were a lawyer, I would focus on Cordial Minuet's betting as the primary element of chance. Because betting involves valuing your current position at the point when you have to bet, and most of the time you don't know for certain how the strength of your position compares to that of the other player, you could argue that you are placing a wager based on an element that is controlled by chance. Because of the shared uncertainty both players have regarding how their column picks affect the score they will get, neither player is truly in control of the outcome of picking. And therefore, it would be fair in a sense to say, that there is an element of randomness in the score you get, even though the score was technically generated by a decision shared by both players. Can you honestly claim that there is no element of luck in the score you get when it is influenced by elements neither player controls completely? And what happens if one of the players uses a random number generator to pick their columns? Surely that would have to count as an element of chance, right? Even if you as the designer can't control how columns are picked, the mere fact that they can be picked randomly could be interpreted as an element of chance.

I just think it is naive to assume changing how board layouts are given to players will really make that much difference from a legal perspective. It probably wouldn't hurt to to try and remove as much chance from the game as possible, but in the end there are elements of chance in Cordial Minuet that can't be changed. I think in a real court case, Cordial Minuet would have to fight an uphill battle no matter what you do. Especially if the prosecutor bothers to read the forum records, which refer to playing Cordial Minuet as "gambling" all over the place. That just plain doesn't look good. I hate to say this, but if you are not prepared to fight a legal battle regarding how Cordial Minuet should be classified, maybe you shouldn't be doing this in the first place...

But that would create the problem of players constantly leaving games in order to gain an advantage. The problem of players leaving games early is already bad enough. Giving them such a huge incentive to do so would just make things 100 times worse.

Go is the best board game ever conceived of in my opinion, and even go players can't settle on the best komi (handicap for the second player)...

Hmm... Well, it's kind of subjective isn't it? Ideally the right chip count should be the one players actually like the most. Which is tough because I think any chip count is going to alienate at least a few players. I don't think a metric like how often players fold is going to tell you much about that. I think if there is anything that will tell you how well a chip count is working, it will be the average amount of time spent playing by all the players who sign on for a given day. I think that if more players like the chip count, it stands to reason they will be having more fun when they play with it, and will want to keep playing for a longer amount of time. Maybe look at the ratio of the total players to the total tribute too, since that will be a good indicator of how much money is actually moving around, and besides that it will tell you what is the most profitable chip count is for the person running the server.

The average buy-in for games is already pretty low, how much lower could it get? I mean, I have never heard of a gambling game before where it was so difficult to convince people to even bet $1.00. I think in a way, the skill depth is too high. Unskilled players are too scared of skilled players because they will have no chance whatsoever to win, and skilled played are too afraid of other skilled players because they don't want to lose precious money when it is so hard and time consuming to earn it in the first place. Reducing the skill depth may be the only way to get over this hurdle and get players actually moving money around. Besides, there is still plenty of skill depth in the picking to make up for what would be lost in the betting. Cordial Minuet is not poker, after all.

I'm not usually one for quotations, but there is a particular quotation that I always keep in the back of my head when designing a computer program:

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

It is one of the truest things I have ever heard uttered by another person. The temptation when designing something is always to make it as simple and elegant as possible. You never want a design to be cluttered by confusing and unnecessary complexity. Especially if it's something someone else will have to see, or even interact with. But you will notice that in spite of a world of programmers, many of whom aspire to this principle, most games still have more than one configuration option. I mean, just look at a game like StarCraft... The idea that you should be able to pick a single stack size that would be better than any other may just be one of those cases where you are making things too simple. If having different stack sizes adds variety and enjoyment to the game, then the price of simplicity may very well be too high.

Edit: Another question you might want to ask yourself as a designer, is do you even have the necessary information to determine what stack size works the best for the majority of players without testing it in some way?

Right, well, 100 chip count games do have their good points. Although I have to warn you that bluffing in the first round will typically have devastating consequences if the other player knows what they are doing (which I do ). But this is why I say, let people pick their own chip count and let the market decide. Really the worst thing that can happen is we will learn more about what does or doesn't make Cordial Minuet work.

The time limit thing may still be problematic if a player decided to stall the game as soon as they had the lead. At least that's what I would do...

I say just have a fixed buy-in when you play your first tournament match with a warning screen to prevent players from accidentally buying into the tournament. I would also add a rule that doesn't allow you to play against the same person twice. This both discourages collusion (because the advantage you gain from colluding is offset by cost of the buy-in), and discourages running from matches (because once you run you will not have a chance to play the person again, lowering your potential winnings). That might actually make things really interesting because whenever you played against someone, you would have to weigh the risks of continuing to play them against the cost of leaving the match early.

That being said, it would still be possible to exploit this system with collusion. It would just require you to put up a bit more money at the start. But this is true of literally every non-bracketed tournament structure I can think of. You might be able to police things though, by carefully examining the winner's match records and looking for any signs of suspicious activity. The signs would be fairly obvious in most cases. For example, if someone was obviously throwing matches to another player, or if someone was playing against only players with no other match records, or if someone played most of their matches against new accounts (or accounts that hadn't been used much outside of tournaments), or if someone conveniently managed to play against the same set of other players and won in multiple different tournaments. There is no perfect solution to catch someone who is cheating, but if you police things as well as you can, you can at least make it very difficult to get away with.

Collusion in this case is an unsolvable problem. It hasn't even been solved in situations like professional poker games, so I wouldn't expect to be able to solve it in an environment like this. For the entire first hour of the tournament that I was ahead, I kept thinking to myself how easy it would have been to win this tournament if I had just one other person working with me. I could have gotten ahead in few enough games that it would not even have looked that suspicious. I think the only thing you could do would be to adapt a more traditional tournament structure with brackets, but in my experience with fighting games, doing this kind of thing online is pretty hit and miss. A lot of times, less that half the people who sign up will even show up to play. You could have a tournament entry fee to help prevent that (and also seed the pot), but then you would get many fewer players. Personally, I would have been happy to pay a $10 fee to participate in a Cordial Minuet tournament worth $200, but I can't speak for everyone.

That's what I was doing too, but I really messed up by sitting out the first hour. By the time I started playing again, there were too many players who were willing to rest on their laurels and not take any big risks. I kept trying to get people to go all in, but jere was the only player who obliged me, and I pretty much broke even against him.