4P Giveaway aborted game rate is high - this is avoidable

Sort:
admiralstubing

I've noticed a high % of these games are aborted because a player doesn't know the compulsory capture rule up front, gets confused, fails to make a move, and runs out of time.  All other players end up sitting there, waiting it out.  The rate of this occurrence is higher because there are 4 players.  No need to get rigorous with the numbers here - a hypothetical number an make the point:

For present purposes, I'll define "spoiler" to be a player who effectively ruins the game by timing out when they don't see how to move.  (You can include cases where they abandon, leaving everyone else with a bot, which can be even worse, as the random moves can make the outcome based less on skill.  Regardless, you get the idea...)

Let P = the probability that a player who joins a game will be a spoiler.

Let Q = (1-P) = the probability that a player is NOT a spoiler.

Then the probability that a game is NOT spoiled is Q^4, so the probability that a game IS spoiled is:

1 - (1-P)^4

I don't know the true numbers, but consider these values of P and the corresponding probabilities of games being "spoiled":

P(random player being a spoiler) P(random game being spoiled)
0.01 0.039
0.05 0.185
0.10 0.343
0.15 0.477

Again, I don't know the real numbers, but I'm guessing the number of games that actually end like this is somewhere in the middle of this range.  It's not 4 in 100 games, it might be one in 5 or 1 in 3.  1 in 3 games ruined seems high, but it only requires 1 in 10 players who join doing so on a whim, and without knowing the rules.  I don't blame them, I get it, but it is frustrating.

Proposed solution:

Before a player joins a variant game that they've never played before, they need to go through a small "mini game" of the variant, demonstrating they understand some crucial facet of the rules.  There are other variants where this might be useful, but 4P giveaway uniquely suffers from this problem:  e.g. you often have to capture a pawn with your Q on move 2 or 3.  Understandably counterintuitive to first time players!