The Science of Game Strategy 136
First time accepted submitter JacobAlexander writes "Writing in PNAS, a University of Manchester physicist has discovered that some games are simply impossible to fully learn, or too complex for the human mind to understand. Dr Tobias Galla from The University of Manchester and Professor Doyne Farmer from Oxford University and the Santa Fe Institute, ran thousands of simulations of two-player games to see how human behavior affects their decision-making. From the article: 'In simple games with a small number of moves, such as Noughts and Crosses the optimal strategy is easy to guess, and the game quickly becomes uninteresting. However, when games became more complex and when there are a lot of moves, such as in chess, the board game Go or complex card games, the academics argue that players' actions become less rational and that it is hard to find optimal strategies.'"
Re:What about Magic? (Score:4, Informative)
If you draw nothing but lands, you're screwed. Get no lands, you're screwed.
This, without exception, is my biggest problem with Magic. No matter how good you are or how good your deck is, it's realistically very possible to be completely screwed out of a game by the random nature of your deck.
That's probably the reason I'm such a fan of Dominion [wikipedia.org]. It's a card game where strategy is truly the only difference between winners and losers. Add in its low cost of entry and high replayability, and you got a game that's (in my opinion) much better made than Magic.