Getting an edge in a board game (part 0)

I'm on vacation, and because of Covid-19 and Omicron variant, I end up spending a lot of time at home. One of my favourite pass times is to play Gremlins Inc with my friends.

Gremlins Inc is a board game available on Windows, macOS and Linux.

This is how the game looks.

There are three main components at a high level: players, board, and your card deck. An elementary explanation is that you play cards on your turn and move your game piece according to a number displayed on the card. If you play smart, you can play multiple cards during your turn.

Since I'm a developer and want to over-analyze this game even if it does not affect my bottom line, I decided to go and check if I could get some alpha (edge) over my friends.

👺 Evil planning

There are different ways to get an advantage, but I'm interested in the one related to stats and ML (since ML is very 🔥 right now 😎 💸).

Since the game has three main components: players, board and card deck, my edge can come with problem framing for one or more of these components 🔎.

I know that there have been done a lot DS done for HeathStone Game which is another board game that also uses cards although in a slightly different way. I believe in standing on the shoulders of giants so I would shamlessly climb on the research done for HearthStone and try to 🛠️ it into Gremlins Inc.

The first low hanging problem is to learn what's the card distribution in Gremlins Inc and do some DS viz to see if I can spot some actionable insights.

• Resources for inspiring reasearch
  • Dive in HearthStone from a data perspective
  • Analysis of gameplay strategies in hearthstone: a data science approachapproach