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Comment by tylervigen | Hacker News Reader

I have never played it, but I could imagine a scoring mechanism that would make it interesting, and perhaps is implied by the rules:

The score value starts at 1. Every additional "check" multiplies the score value by 2 (so 2, 4, 8, 16...). The first player to say "checkmate" receives the score. Track your summed score between games; the player with the highest overall score at any given time is "winning."

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Isn't the optimal strategy just to say "checkmate" immediately? That dominates anything else.

That would be the equivalent of spawn camping.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camping_(video_games)

I think to have any chance of making this work, you’d need to have a community of players in a tournament. Everybody gets to issue some number of challenges, and the winner is the person who accumulates the most points over the course of the tournament. I think you should only get points based on the length of games you win.

Then the game at least has a chance to develop some mechanics. Players who delayed longer have a chance at winning more points. They also might be challenged more…

Not in an iterated game. If my team agrees we'll never checkmate before turn 5, the game is the same except we start the actual game on turn 5 with a big score advantage compared to everyone else.

You can leave at any time by breaking the rule, but then you will be playing with other people who say checkmate immediately, and that would be much worse.

Being prosocial is in fact a stable equilibrium. As prophecized by gestures broadly at everything.

Isn't that just iterated prisoner dilemma?

It only works if there are more than two players

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