I start with chess: a board game where 1 player goes up against another in a fair, zero-RNG battle of wits and planning. Well, no RNG except for who gets to go first anyway. In a sense we can view chess like a card game mirror match where both players’ decks start on the board. At every point in the game you know exactly what you are up against and you know exactly how every piece is going to behave.
In such a deterministic environment you can plan several turns ahead, working out what you want to do, how you want to do it, and devising counter-plays for your opponent’s inevitable counter-plays. It’s all very skilful… if you are a good player and that description applies to you. I am not a good chess player: I know the rules, but I’m not interested enough in the game to invest the time and effort to make chess a skill of mine. Because of this, I know that if I play against a good player, my odds of winning are very small (which frankly acts as a deterrent against me wanting to play the game, and is certainly a good argument for why HS has so much RNG: to let bad players still enjoy it. But I digress).
However, while I know I’m bad at playing chess conventionally, I also know I can help even the odds by reducing my opponent’s ability too. Which brings me to what I call ‘the bamboozle play’. The idea is simple: do something the opponent won’t expect yet doesn’t do you any harm either. Often this involves moving a piece that still leaves all your key pieces protected but has no influence on the current points of tension on the board. I basically pick a piece at random and as long as it can do something safe I’m happy to move it.
The upshot of the bamboozle play is that it leaves the opponent unsure what I’m going to do, thereby negating a lot of their advantage in being able to predict future turns. The bamboozle play itself is not especially skilful; yes, I must know the rules well enough to know what is safe to do, but it doesn’t go a whole lot deeper than that. However, the very idea of the bamboozle play is quite skilful since it is designed specifically to counter my main disadvantage.
Thus, by feeding a bit of randomness into how I play, I am a more skilful player than I would be without it. Of course I could choose to be even more skilful by actually learning to play chess properly, but I have better things to do than that.
