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Misha comments on A Player of Games - Less Wrong
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This is a bit different because typically, most of the people playing any given game have played it before, with only a few newcomers who learn the game as they play it. It wouldn't be a good way to play the meta-game, because you shouldn't expect to be competitive against someone who has played the game for a while.
It shouldn't matter as far as "learning to learn games goes", ideally. However, I expect it will, because you're not competing against other people learning to learn games. If you want to win -- and most people like to win -- the incentive here is to keep playing this one game until you're good at it.
Try it before you knock it -- I bet that if you're the kind of person posting on Less Wrong, if you have someone who explains the rules well, and if you're really spending all your mental energy focusing on figuring the game out, you'll stand a good chance of winning a lot of games on the first go. That's my experience so far.
That said, it might be even more fun playing against other people who are all new.
I strongly agree with this. In general, most people don't work to optimise their strategy, and a newbie who's used to thinking about long-term or meta-strategies is highly likely to win or come very close on their first attempt.
Probably not. People don't enjoy being thrashed and the situation can become socially awkward. Leveling the playing field somewhat by having players with existing competence makes things more challenging and is less likely to provoke people into just having sour grapes and refusing to play that game again.
I did something like this back in the 90s, with a guy in a local gaming club who had a big collection of boardgames, played a different one each time, and won about 50% of the time. It's important to bear in mind the typical boardgame does not have the depth of chess or Go -- those are classics for a reason -- and most of them are actually pretty much ideal for this sort of rapid pickup.
You have that right. There is nothing like the combination of having a lot of fun and winning. Oh, wait, different 'pickup'. Nevermind. ;)