"Magic: The Gathering" is officially the world's most complex game
Magic: The Gathering is a card game in which wizards cast spells, summon creatures, and exploit magic objects to defeat their opponents. In the game, two or more players each assemble a deck of 60 cards with varying powers. They choose these decks from a pool of some 20,000 cards created as the game evolved. Though similar to role-playing fantasy games such as Dungeons and Dragons, it has significantly more cards and more complex rules than other card games.
And that raises an interesting question: among real-world games (those that people actually play, as opposed to the hypothetical ones game theorists usually consider), where does Magic fall in complexity?
Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Alex Churchill, an independent researcher and board game designer in Cambridge, UK; Stella Biderman at the Georgia Institute of Technology; and Austin Herrick at the University of Pennsylvania.
His team has measured the computational complexity of the game for the first time by encoding it in a way that can be played by a computer or Turing machine. "This construction establishes that Magic: The Gathering is the most computationally complex real-world game known in the literature," they say.
Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete (arXiv:1904.09828)
Related: How Magic the Gathering Began, and Where it Goes Next
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 09 2019, @09:13PM (2 children)
I know there are too many dimensions to make a simple "card value" - but... that would be my approach to how to play a "fair" card game: both players get to have up to X points worth of cards in their deck.
Having to buy random packs until you get lucky is just as crappy as baseball cards ever were, moreso: no gum.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Thursday May 09 2019, @10:33PM
Most people go to the MtG 2ndary markets and buy what they want. In most cases that'll be cheaper.
You might as well make your points "dollars". And then both players get to spend X dollars :)
Although lots of people looking for more fair fights do sealed deck / draft. And in non-tournament environments there's a zillion ways to rebalance..
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday May 10 2019, @04:14PM
There is a format that does exactly that - Canadian Highlander. [gamepedia.com] But it's not very popular (overshadowed by Commander)...I think I've run into one guy in person who actually had a deck put together for it.
You may be able to scare up some people online if you wanted to play a game. But you'd probably have to use one of the third-party clients like XMage because I doubt MTGO has built-in support for the point system.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"