Magic: the Gathering comes to mind, since the community often focuses explicitly on thinking-about-probabilities due to both the hidden information (what cards does your opponent have?) and the random factor (what cards will I draw later in the game?)
One of my favorite stories is about a high-level competitor who had a tendency to win since he could work out “I will ONLY win if I draw this one card” and would then craft his entire game around the expectation of that card—after all, if he failed to draw it, he was dead anyway :)
When I wrote the comment, I explicitly thought of poker, chess, the Settlers of Catan and Wizard, all of these games where thinking with probabilities (w.r.t. the opponents’ cards / the opponents’ actions and the state of the board / the opponents’ actions and the roll of the dice / the opponents’ cards, respectively) can be more or less helpful. In the end, I chose diplomacy because additionally, it shares the characteristic of simultaneous moves.
There are a large number of games where the probabilistic nature is more readily apparent. Bridge is one of my favorites, but poker and backgammon both come to mind.
The same applies to Diplomacy and many other games in which one can enhance their performance by thinking probabilistically.
I’ve played diplomacy, what other examples were you thinking of?
Magic: the Gathering comes to mind, since the community often focuses explicitly on thinking-about-probabilities due to both the hidden information (what cards does your opponent have?) and the random factor (what cards will I draw later in the game?)
One of my favorite stories is about a high-level competitor who had a tendency to win since he could work out “I will ONLY win if I draw this one card” and would then craft his entire game around the expectation of that card—after all, if he failed to draw it, he was dead anyway :)
When I wrote the comment, I explicitly thought of poker, chess, the Settlers of Catan and Wizard, all of these games where thinking with probabilities (w.r.t. the opponents’ cards / the opponents’ actions and the state of the board / the opponents’ actions and the roll of the dice / the opponents’ cards, respectively) can be more or less helpful. In the end, I chose diplomacy because additionally, it shares the characteristic of simultaneous moves.
There are a large number of games where the probabilistic nature is more readily apparent. Bridge is one of my favorites, but poker and backgammon both come to mind.