So! Here's another post to get you thinking about strategy. It's a variation on the last post, so if you haven't seen that you might want to check it out!

Just like last time, you're going to want to give each player 1 suit from a full deck of cards, and just like last time I recommend that you play with 2 players. This time, though, some things are different! Setup: Each player should shuffle their suit and place it face down in front of them.

Rounds: In the first round, each player draws 1 card. Each player looks at their card(s). Then, starting with the player who generously opted to go first and proceeding left, each player says how many of their cards they expect to win with. In the first round, you can either say 1 or 0. (This is called bidding, as you probably already know.) Then each player places a card face down and you play the original game as usual until no one is holding a card (which will be 1 card in the first round).

If a player wins as many as they bid they get X + 2 points where X is the number they bid. If a player misses their bid they lose the difference between what they made and what they bid (so if I bid 3 and made 1, I would lose 2 points for going under by 2. And if I bid 2 and made 4 I would lose 2 points for going over by 2).

Do not shuffle the played cards back into your suit- keep the played cards for each player face up next to their suit, where every other player can see what has been played so far.

Then repeat this process for 2,3,4, and 3 cards. (The last round is 3 because you'll run out of cards.)

The winner is the player at the end of 5 rounds with the most total points!

See how the game changes when you shuffle scored back in and go up to 10 rounds! Do you prefer the incomplete information version of the game, or the complete information version?

Last time, there were some really great ideas in the comments that I don't want anyone to miss out on! A lot of people definitely understood pretty quickly that in the information-complete version (described in the first post) there is no "best opening" and that the game comes down entirely to reading your opponent.

DanQ had a great idea for a variation, which I will post below but is his:

Scoring/Ranking Variant: Low Wins The lowest card wins the round, not the highest, and the number of points is the total of all of the cards you win, not the number of rounds you win. This is subtly different than the Scoring Variant, because the cards which are most likely to win you the round are the ones that gain you the least points.

I'm a huge fan of a tension between power and payoff, and this is an extremely elegant example of it. That variation for scoring/ranking will also work interestingly if you apply it to today's game!

Lemme know what you think of this one! Loved the responses last time.