Just to underscore a broader point: recreational games have various characteristics which don’t generalise to all situations modelled game-theoretically. Most importantly, they’re designed to be fun for humans to play, to have consistent and explicit rules, to finish in a finite amount of time (RISK notwithstanding), to follow some sort of narrative and to have means of unambiguously identifying winners.
Anecdotally, if you’re familiar with recreational games, it’s fairly straightforward to identify victory conditions in games just by watching them being played, because their conventions mean those conditions are drawn from a considerably reduced number of possibilities. There are, however, lots of edge- and corner-cases where this probably isn’t possible without taking a large sample of observations.
Can we know the victory condition from just watching the game?
Just to underscore a broader point: recreational games have various characteristics which don’t generalise to all situations modelled game-theoretically. Most importantly, they’re designed to be fun for humans to play, to have consistent and explicit rules, to finish in a finite amount of time (RISK notwithstanding), to follow some sort of narrative and to have means of unambiguously identifying winners.
Anecdotally, if you’re familiar with recreational games, it’s fairly straightforward to identify victory conditions in games just by watching them being played, because their conventions mean those conditions are drawn from a considerably reduced number of possibilities. There are, however, lots of edge- and corner-cases where this probably isn’t possible without taking a large sample of observations.