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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7446550" data-attributes="member: 996">For better or worse, that's the definition of balance I'll be using when I discuss it...Since it's a solved game, we can know exactly how (im)balanced Tic-tac-toe is.  It presents X with 9 initial choices, obviously. However, 6 of them are meaningless: it doesn't matter which corner or side you place your X in, the game's potential results set will be the same, regardless (there's nothing special about the top/bottom/left/right of the grid, it could be rotated with no effect on play). There's three meaningful choices for X: center, corner, or side. One of those, choosing a side square, is decidedly inferior to the others, the choice of corner square is clearly the best (again, it's a solved game, so we know that X starting in a corner & playing optimally leaves O only two paths to stalemate, both of which start with the center square). On his first move, O would seem to have 8 choices, but, if X has played corner & is playing optimally, has only one viable choice: center, the others result in certain victory for X.  If X is playing optimally, O can force a draw by playing optimally, but, if O makes one mistake, X can force a win. OTOH, if O is playing optimally, X must make two mistakes to allow O a chance at victory. That is a very impractical definition of balance, since it relies on factors outside the game, itself, and yeah, that kind of balance would be problematic to hard-code into a system.  However, many games do incorporate player ability to deliver /fairness/ (not balance, by the definition I prefer) - through various methods of handicapping.Balance, however, as I see it, is about presenting players with choices, not about guaranteeing they make the right ones.  So it's perfectly plausible for the better player to 'win' a balanced game quite consistently.That said, draughts isn't exactly a very balanced game.  It's devoid of trap or optimal choices, but, like utterly-imbalanced & solved tic-tac-toe, it presents a player with only 3 meaningful and viable choices.  It's just that, it presents only 3 choices, period, not 9, 2 of which are meaningful & viable, then 8, only one of which is viable (and thus none are really meaningful).  Arguably, there's no meaningful choice in draughts, either, so it fails that definition of balanced, entirely.At that, I find myself tempted to do a very forge-like thing and create a completely unintuitive definition of 'imbalance' so I'm not going to.  ;|  I'm going to leave it at neither game is an example of perfect, nor even of a non-trivial degree balance.  One is perfectly fair, but very limited in total number of choices it delivers to players, the other is clearly imbalanced & solved, both are pretty boring.Again, like any competitive game it's more fair than it is balanced (I'm not deeply familiar, but the random aspect is presumably fair, but means players are presented with only a small sub-set of the game's possible choices with each hand - you can be dealt a 'bad hand,' too bad - I'd expect being dealer impacts 'balance' to some degree, etc).  And, like draughts, it's much more about playing your opponents than playing just the mechanics of the game, itself. I didn't mean to imply that it was, just that the charop meta-game, was analogous to 'solving' a sub-set of the game.  Mainly in that there are sub-optimal & trap options that have been excluded from it.  FWIW. A sufficiently 'sub-optimal' build can very easily be strictly inferior, not only less effective at what it can do, but able to do less in terms of flexibility as well as power.  If everyone has the same level of system mastery, that choice is de-facto removed from the chargen meta-game, if someone steps in the trap, his choices in play of the actual game are reduced.  Just imbalance in action.  Agreed on traps.  I'm sorry I implied more than I intended in alluding to solved games...</blockquote>

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