Does skip mean play?

[UmpireNate]

Just played a 3-player game. Partner on my left had w2 (playable) on chop and another w2 in hand, so needed him to discard. Next player had a critical k2 on chop.

So I “stole” his save to force him to discard.

He responded by bombing off left and his reasoning was “why steal”?

I argued there is no such thing as “stealing”, the clues meaning remains the same, it’s a play clue or save clue, in this case a save clue since it was number clue on chop of a critical card.

He said lol and said I lack any logic , so asking here and said it was a long finesse clue for k4 k3 k2

If I can figure out how to link game I will, but that was situation.

[BusError]

This is the replay, the useful sequence starts around turn 60: https://boardgamearena.com/archive/repl ... s=90676792

I always come back to principles when thinking about what conventions are effective. There's a couple principles here I would use to guide why skip shouldn't mean play blindly. I also hold the opinion that skip shouldn't mean play when the clue could be a save.

There are a whole variety of reasons you might clue someone aside from the person on your left:
1. The person on your left has trash on their discard, and you want to prioritize clearing that trash.
2. You have some reason to believe it's unsafe for you to discard (e.g., Double Discard Avoidance convention).
3. You want to clue a finesse, bluff, trash bluff, etc.

The principle I use when deciding the motivation is "can I narrow this list down to exactly one option". In this case, they can't do so. If you had clued it off-chop, that would eliminate all possibilities other than it being a play clue, and a response being required to prevent a bomb, but this is not the situation. Because it could be discard management, in that seat I must assume it is.

As a thought exercise, we could consider the alternative - imagine if we biased toward play whenever possible. You can't make this save clue, and must discard. They must make this save clue, and you must discard again on the following turn (assuming no new playable cards have come up). The cost of delaying the play of 2W has cost the team 2 Pace collectively, and potentially something like 3W being lost. I hold the opinion that this is a bad tradeoff - it's less predictable, and it offers less options to each player on their turn.

I also hold the opinion that the most valuable thing you can do early to mid game is discard known duplicates and trash as fast as possible.

Every convention is a trade-off - so what price are we paying? Well, if they had 4K left, you couldn't do a long finesse here. I'd make that trade-off every time.

TL;DR: "Skip Inference" is a cancer, and makes the game less fun because you have less options each turn and increase your exposure to bottom-deck risk.

[Jellby]

To "why steal?", just answer "because I thought it best".

[SchengW]

Skip is a normal way to manage hands. It never means blind play because otherwise the clue receiver would assume it as a bluff, finesse, promise bluff, double bluff, layer or so on. Thus as long as the skip save is a normal chop save, then it should be assumed as just a normal skip and save. The bomb was a mistake.

Another tip: after y32 reverse i think its better to fix with number 2 splashing another useful g2, instead of fixing with 3 for finesse until y3. Because y3 wont lost anyway and could be clued later easily eventually also directly finesse with y4, but keeping g2 on the table worths more.

[Eton2343]

No.