Luck factor? ("Earth" and "Patchwork")

[FrankJones]

High luck factor and first player advantage are two completely unrelated things. A game with 0 luck can have significant first player advantage or second player advantage (e.g. tic-tac-toe). Regardless of the luck factor, a game may have the players balanced, or the first player could have a significant advantage, or the second player may have a significant advantage.

Good point.

So, with regard to Patchwork, once the pieces are laid out and player 1 is determined, it's all strategy and tactics. No hidden information, No altering the order of the patch pieces, etc.

And yet, with a powerful enough computer, it could be determined which player would win if both players make the optimal move. OF course, that could be said of any such game: Chess, Gomoku, COnnect6, even Go. But that would take immense computing power. But in theory, all those games are solvable from the starting position. Same with Tzaar and that entire family of games.

In a game in which all the information is clearly visible from the start and it is trivially easy to determine who will win, I would assign that game "luck 5". For example, a hypothetical nonsense game where 3 empty squares are on a piece of paper, and players alternate filling one in until someone has 2 filled squares.

But, in a game where it is pretty much impossible to plan a definite winning sequence from the start (one that takes into account every possible decision tree based on all possible moves by either player), such as Chess or go, I would assign "Luck 0".

I would say that for ne, Patchwork is sufficiently complex from the starting position to assign it "luck 0".

I do think it would be pretty cool if a human, without using any computer assistance, looked at a starting patchwork game position and declared, "Player 1 will win this game, and by this score", and be correct.

[Ceaseless]

In a game in which all the information is clearly visible from the start and it is trivially easy to determine who will win, I would assign that game "luck 5". For example, a hypothetical nonsense game where 3 empty squares are on a piece of paper, and players alternate filling one in until someone has 2 filled squares.

I would say that for ne, Patchwork is sufficiently complex from the starting position to assign it "luck 0".

You would be using a different definition of luck than the norm then. The game you described would be a luck 0 game (going first doesn't seem to be a factor noted in these sorts of things, they focus on the luck in the actual playing of the game itself.) Luck isn't about how easy a game is to win. To give another example, Tic Tac Toe is a game of complete skill and no luck, even if it is a low skill game.

Luck 5 (I'm under the impression 0-5 is the metric being used due to it being BGA's numbering system) would actually be the opposite of trivially easy to determine who will win. In fact, it should be impossible to determine it because luck plays too much of a role to work it out.

What we would be looking at rather is the impact strategy has on a game. It tends to be negatively correlated with luck, but it's not forced. A game with lots of luck can still have plenty of skill, and even a game with no luck can have minimal skill (I gave Tic Tac Toe as an example earlier.)

I do think it would be pretty cool if a human, without using any computer assistance, looked at a starting patchwork game position and declared, "Player 1 will win this game, and by this score", and be correct.

I would expect this to be impossible for most games of Patchwork, as that would require an optimal losing strategy in the game. But the only objective evaluations are win, loss, and draw. For the losing player all positions are objectively equal, as they all have the same outcome. The differences are subjective. You might look at things like which playthrough takes the most turns, scores the highest total, or scores the closest total to the winning score instead (would you rather score 15 points to an opposing 25, or 20 points to an opposing 40?) For the losing player the "best" strategy is the one most likely to trip their opponent up, though this is a subjective matter since it requires insights on potential mistakes. You'd ideally want some insight as to how players think, what theories are going around, etc. so you would have some idea of where the most likely gaps in theory are. The point is you can't objectively predict which losing strategy will be chosen in your hypothetical, as they are all objectively equally losing.