Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Binary Scramble Game

Here is a game for any plural number of players.

A list of 0's and 1's is written on a piece of paper by the players taking turns, each player appending a 0 or a 1 onto the right side of the list each turn. After a predetermined number of turns (which is a multiple of the number of players), the first part of this game is over.

In the second part of the game, the players take turns rewriting the entire list each turn with one digit the player chooses flipped from 0 to 1 or from 1 to 0.

The new list cannot match any list previously arrived at during the game.

If the lengths of the runs of 0's and 1's form a permutation of the lengths of the runs from any previous list, then the currently moving player gets a point.

(It doesn't matter if a particular run-length, an element in the permutation, was for a run of 0's or for a run of 1's.)

The game continues until either a player first achieves a predetermined score or until no more moves are possible.

The player with the greatest score wins.


Example game (to start):

001110101 (start: 2,3,1,1,1,1)
000110101 (3,2,1,1,1,1 point)
000111101 (3,4,1,1)
000011101 (4,3,1,1 point)
100011101 (1,3,3,1,1)
101011101 (1,1,1,1,3,1,1)
111011101 (3,1,3,1,1 point)
111010101 (3,1,1,1,1,1,1 point)
111010111 (3,1,1,1,3 point)
... etc.

Thanks,
Leroy Quet

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