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Maksim Bober
Maksim Bober

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Getting an edge in a board game (part 0)

I'm on vacation, and because of Covid-19 and Omicron variant, I end up spending a lot of time at home. One of my favourite pass times is to play Gremlins Inc with my friends.

Gremlins Inc is a board game available on Windows, macOS and Linux.

This is how the game looks.
Description of the game board

There are three main components at a high level: players, board, and your card deck. An elementary explanation is that you play cards on your turn and move your game piece according to a number displayed on the card. If you play smart, you can play multiple cards during your turn.

Since I'm a developer and want to over-analyze this game even if it does not affect my bottom line, I decided to go and check if I could get some alpha (edge) over my friends.

Gif with Dr.Evil

πŸ‘Ί Evil planning

There are different ways to get an advantage, but I'm interested in the one related to stats and ML (since ML is very πŸ”₯ right now 😎 πŸ’Έ).

Since the game has three main components: players, board and card deck, my edge can come with problem framing for one or more of these components πŸ”Ž.

I know that there have been done a lot DS done for HeathStone Game which is another board game that also uses cards although in a slightly different way. I believe in standing on the shoulders of giants so I would shamlessly climb on the research done for HearthStone and try to πŸ› οΈ it into Gremlins Inc.

The first low hanging problem is to learn what's the card distribution in Gremlins Inc and do some DS viz to see if I can spot some actionable insights.

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