![]() Who are the players you are competing against or not paying attention to who could be great allies? Who or what are the antagonists you are not taking into account? What rules can you change, or just discard? How could you play the game differently for more rewarding outcomes? What could you accomplish as a result? I invite you to think about who the rules of our economy and society tell you is your competition. Now I invite you to rethink the investing rules you have adopted, and your objective. So I suggested we join sides to play against our invisible third player: “Let’s build the tallest, most stable structure we can, to withstand the wind.” After initial strong reluctance to collaborate, we eventually became allies, built our tallest towers to date, and had a lot of fun finding creative ways to defy the forces working to keep our towers weak and small. Here we were playing against each other, when we were actually both facing a greater competitor: 20 mile per hour winds! My husband was trying to make the structure unstable for me but, at the end of each game, the wind was the one having all the fun. It also helps explain why trades in Monopoly or Catan don’t work with only two players.On a windy spring day in Las Vegas, my husband and I were playing Jenga and I stopped the game because I felt his moves were not making sense.Īs I thought about what didn’t make sense to me, I realized that it was the rules we had adopted without thinking about their relevance. This is why you should not try to maximize your score in Words with Friends or Scrabble. Thus, you should not exclusively focus on what puts you in a good position you need to pay equal attention to what puts your opponent in a bad position. There are two paths to victory in such interactions: you winning and your opponent losing. What we are observing here is a special case of a more general principle in zero-sum games. Thus, depending on how you perceive those probabilities, your optimal play may be taking the more difficult block! However, if you are successful, you will place your opponent in the near-hopeless situation and almost certainly win. You are definitely more likely to lose this turn if you try taking it. This is a tall order-it is not loose precisely because it is supporting the weight above it. Your only other feasible option is to force out the middle block. This means you will be forced to do the aforementioned nearly impossible task. When the game comes back to you, the new top row will still only have two blocks on it. Your opponent will immediately follow up by taking the remaining side block. Life is more complicated if the side blocks are loose. ![]() Your opponent is almost certain to lose here, so your initial decision is straightforward. ![]() Instead, your opponent must take a row with the middle block missing, slowly re-position a side block into the middle slot, and then remove the other block. There are no blocks that can be removed in isolation without crumbling the tower. What happens if you take it? Your opponent is in deep trouble. Let’s say that the middle block is loose. In short, the future matters if you ignore it, trouble will find you. ![]() After doing so, choose the option that maximizes your benefits given how others will maximize their benefits later. Broadly, backward induction tells us that the best way to strategize for right now is to consider how others will respond to whatever you can do. If the sides are loose, you would take one of them if the middle was loose, then you would take it.īackward induction suggests caution here. Under normal circumstances, you should poke around that row to figure out which is the case. If the middle block is slightly larger, then the sides will be loose due to this if the middle block is slightly smaller, then it alone will be loose. Consequently, the tower’s weight is not usually distributed evenly across a row. Jenga blocks are not completely uniform some are slightly smaller or slightly larger than others. If you have played Jenga before, you know what normally comes next. Without doing some ridiculous Jenga acrobatics, this gives you exactly three blocks to choose from, all of them in the second row from the top. Jenga’s rules only allow you to take blocks from below a completed row, so the top is off limits. The only exceptions are the top two rows. To save you some time, almost the entire tower is “spent”-either the middle block or the two side blocks are missing from just about every level. Imagine you are playing Jenga, and it is your turn.
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