The problem with multiplayer (or massively-multiplayer) casual games is that at some point after release, everyone moves on to the next big thing and they become empty wastelands. Crickets. Tumbleweeds.

I propose that a games publisher release a series of games where the actions in the most recently released games are translated into actions in the previous game.

I think it would be connect four.

Since "Guess Who" is really a mind-numbingly boring game if you are above the age of 6, it's probably natural that adults trapped in a cabin, surrounded by flesh-eating zombies, with nothing on the shelf except Guess Who are going to invent some more difficult variations.

Trapped in the suffrage shack, this version was invented.

I'm not sure how I never thought of this before, but I've been having a really bad run of Yahtzee and was wondering what my lowest ever score has been. Probably something a little south of 150. 135 maybe?

The lowest possible Yahtzee score is 5 - you put five 1s in chance and conspire to score 0 in every other box.

But what's the lowest possible score you can get if you are playing in good faith?

If you rolled 1-1-2-2-3 for every roll, then you'd get

1:2
2:4
3:3
4:0
5:0
6:0
Bonus:0
3K:0
4K:0
Full House:0
Small Straight:0
Large Straight:0
Yahtzee:0
Chance:9

On the second roll of a play, I had 4 sixes and a five.

4K and Yahtzee were both open.

Obviously, the play would be worth 29 points in 4K, and Yahtzee is only a 1 in 6 chance, with a 2 in 3 chance of getting less than 29 on the next roll.

My heuristic is to *always* roll for Yahtzee on 4K if Yahtzee is open (and sometimes if Yahtzee is closed and Large Straight is open).

Expected outcome in this case is the average of all the possible outcomes: avg(50, 29, 28, 27, 26, 25) = 30.88. Go heuristics.

Some counter-intuitive, some not. I haven't done the math on many of these. Some of them I gleaned from looking at the logs of the Optimal Solitaire Yahtzee Player, an invaluable resource.

• Early in the game, ditch a bad roll in the ones.

  Sure, you'll go negative on the bonus, but it's likely you'll make it up if there are still 4 or 5 number boxes left to fill on the left.

• Don't actively try to fill the 1s and 2s boxes.
  
  

Typically what happens is that on your first roll you get 3 ones, and maybe a potentially useful singleton.

And you've already used the ones box.

So the question is, should you go for Yahtzee here? Or should you try to build off the singleton or just re-roll all five dice?

I suspect that if the probability is reasonably close to 1 in 6, it's probably your best chance at a Yahtzee in the game, and thus worth risking the Yahtzee box on.

There are 3 ways to get to Yahtzee from here, and we can sum their individual probabilities to get the overall chances.

A: Woof
B: What?
A (emphatically): WOOF!
B (get's it now): Woof!
A: What?
...
etc.

Minutes of fun whenever you need it.

A team from Ellen's work won the pub quiz at Elephant and Castle last night.

I didn't show up until the 3rd round, and I think I gave as many wrong answers as right answers, so my contribution was minimal. But I still bragged a lot about my correct answers.

The psychology of coming to a consensus when no one knows an answer and different people have different ideas of a best guess is interesting.

http://multisnake.com/

The massively multiplayer online snake game.

I'd also like to see an MMO daleks clone...