I have an old (well, relatively) Nintendo DSi which I generally use to waste time. I’m not trying to beat a particular game – just do something on my free time to relieve boredom. (Honestly, I typically use my tablet the same way.) My favorite DS game is “Clubhouse Games”, a collection of fairly simple games like card games, checkers, etc.
I used to play their version of Hearts quite a bit. When playing against the computer, you have a choice of 3 levels of difficulty … but the rankings can be misleading. It is easier to beat on the “Hard” setting than on the “Normal” setting, due to a flaw in the strategy.
If you’re not familiar with Hearts, the object is either to take as few points as possible or to take everything of value. There are a total of 26 points per hand … if one player collects all 26 points he “shoots the moon” (though we called it “making control” when I was a kid) and all his opponents get 26 points. If no one “shoots the moon” then each player gets the number of points he took added to his score. So … you’d prefer to take zero points, as long as no one else gets all of them, or else to get all of them yourself.
And that’s where the flaw lies. The “hard” setting is very good at not taking points, but rather poor about making sure someone doesn’t take them all. Playing on the “Hard” setting, I “shoot the moon” so often that I always win. I had to switch back to the “Normal” setting just to have any challenge at all!
I recently decided to try out their game “Sevens”. This is based on the classical “Seven Up” card game, but with a couple of changes: all the 7s are played as soon as dealing has been completed, and you can pass any time you want – but if you pass more than 3 times, you forfeit the game. (Since I didn’t actually read the rules it took me a few rounds to find out they were passing when they could have played – but they do, and thus I’ve adopted the same technique when it benefits me.)
Once again, there are a few glaring errors in their “Hard” strategy. Or their “Easy” one, but you expect that. The biggest error is that they play their lower cards first. If you have one card left – a King – and one of the computer players has the Queen of that suit and the King of a different suit, they will play the Queen first allowing you to win. Very basic strategy error, I think any 8 year old would have learned to play the King first.
Okay, I get that if you’re writing a collection of games like that the strategies of the computer players won’t be all that good. There are dedicated Hearts games that can be quite challenging – but this isn’t a dedicated Hearts game. But I don’t expect them to be quite that bad! (Actually, the Sevens game is something of a challenge … since they do play low cards first, if you have any high cards you have to play in a way to force them to play their high cards. What would be the best strategy against human players will fail against the computer about 1/2 of the time because one of the computer players won’t have any Kings and you will. But that’s “dumb luck” and not a real strategy.)
