I was thinking about the speed-based games Set and MyWord today. Both of these games are very difficult to play with players of differing abilities, because the difference in ability makes play frustrating for weaker players. They lose their focus as the cards they’re looking at are simply snatched away. Compare this to a similar game like Boggle. Just as often the stronger player will score a devastating win; but because both players get uninterrupted time to find words, the game doesn’t feel as frustrating.

At work today I was thinking of a simulation I was going to run to prove how much this sucks for the bad player. Here’s the game I was going to simulate:

A game takes 40 seconds and has 25 words to be found. Every second, player A finds a random word with .8 probability, and player B finds a random word with .4 probability. The catch is that only the player who finds a word first gets to score it.

I thought the score would lean heavily towards player A, but in fact, player A gets only about twice B’s score. It turns out that if each player gets to keep all the words they find, not just the ones that they find first, A gets about 160% of B’s score. The difference is noticeable, but not as shocking as I thought it would be.

I thought about fiddling with the simulation some more, but I’m tired and it would kind of be cheating anyway. I’ll ponder the question some more tomorrow, because I feel I’m noticing a real effect, even though the simulation I’m running doesn’t show it.

For the interested, the source (Python) is available upon request.