Earlier today I had an idea for a meta-game a group of people could play. It’d be ideal if you lived in an intentional community, or were at university with a games society, or somewhere with regular Less Wrong Meetups.
Each time you would find a new game. Each of you would then study the rules for half an hour and strategise, and then you’d play it, once. Afterwards, compare thoughts on strategies and meta-strategies. If you haven’t played Imperialism, try that. If you’ve never tried out Martin Gardner’s games, try them. If you’ve never played Phutball, give it a go.
It should help teach us to understand new situations quickly, look for workable exploits, accurately model other people, and compute Nash equilibrium. Obviously, be careful not to end up just spending your life playing games; the aim isn't to become good at playing games, it's to become good at learning to play games - hopefully including the great game of life.
However, it’s important that no-one in the group know the rules before hand, which makes finding the new games a little harder. On the plus side, it doesn’t matter that the games are well-balanced: if the world is mad, we should be looking for exploits in real life.
It could be really helpful if people who knew of good games to play gave suggestions. A name, possibly some formal specifications (number of players, average time of a game), and some way of accessing the rules. If you only have the rules in a text-file, rot13 them please, and likewise for any discussion of strategy.
Chinese chess, surprisingly rare in many Western countries, but has very in depth strategy.
Settlers of Catan (the original. Most of the expansions just make things more complicated)- warning is a bit addictive.
Sprouts- an amusing game due to Conway.
Illuminati- A very amusing game by Steve Jackson. Can take a bit long.
Ninja Burger- another fun Steve Jackson game.
Note that some other Steve Jackson games aren't necessarily worth it (for example Munchkin is a lot of fun but is deliberately unbalanced and so isn't going to work well for the purposes discussed in the top post).
Edit: Thinking about this more, this may in general be a bad idea. Games are designed to be shiny and addictive. Thus, this might be fun but might be bad from an instrumental rationality perspective since it could end up as a large time sink and would superficially seem useful even if it were not helping much at all.
As far as Chinese chess goes, a good amount of skill in Western chess seems to carry over. In particular, the ability to pay attention to the whole board at the same time and remember what's going on where.
There's probably some heavy opening theory that I never learned, but that shouldn't matter unless you're playing against expert players.