Uther Party is a custom mini-game map for the game Warcraft 3. Our local university LAN club has a weird obsession with it. Basically there is a box with a number on it, and the game is to not be holding the box when it lands on 0. You pass the box to the person next to you by pressing either Q, which decrements it by 1 or W which decrements it by 2. If the box is on 1 and you decrement it by 2, it explodes before you pass it.
The game is pretty frustrating, so I decided to make a script to tell me the optimal choice to make. The script works by generating a minmax tree of all possible choices. Each leaf has an array the size of the amount of players, which has a 1 in the field if the player doesn’t die in that playthrough or a 0 if they do. It then goes up the tree with each level of the tree corresponding to a different players turn which attempts to maximise their index in the array. If the two choices have the same chance of death, it takes the average of both children’s chances.
The solver works pretty well, however it assumes that the players aren’t colluding and are only looking to maximise their own score which is a fair assumption, but may not be the case 100% of the time.
You can download the solver here (it has prompt, command and GUI modes). It only requires python, but optionally can use ete2 to print out a graph of the tree if you are really sadistic.
If you want to try it out, I’ve also made a module for the ComSSA IRC bot to facilitate a text based game of mystery box.