Winning Strategies for Classic Board Games — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] These are some of the world's most popular board games that we've all grown up playing. And I've spent the last 6 months meticulously collecting my own data and uncovering all the simple tricks and hacks that will guarantee you an average win rate of

[00:14] - Next. Next. Next. - it will change the way you look at these games forever. - In fact, I'm so confident in my new skills, I came to this public park to offer $100 to anyone who

[00:32] - Yeah, pick a game. - Now the reason I'm so willing to put my money where my mouth is, is because I have some experience using science to expose how to win games at the carnival,

[00:48] - Yeah. - And this glorious defeat of my nephew, along with all the other tears of defeat over the games of were all courtesy of Mr. Malloy, my original high school statistics teacher,

[01:03] who I had approached 10 years ago in search of the perfect Guess Who strategy, and he gave me this Basically, you want to cut the number of characters in half with each question you ask.

[01:15] And if their answer is yes, then your next question would be, does your person's name start And if you keep repeating this, you'll win on average in 5.5 guesses.

[01:30] So if you play best of 5, you'll win 96% of your games and lose 100% of your friends. I'm gonna show you how to almost always win 5 more board games,

[01:44] including Connect Four, Battleship, Tic Tac Toe, Jenga, and Monopoly. And you'll see how these strategies worked out in a head to head competition against one of the But first, we needed some data.

[01:57] assigned them four random locations. It's been a fun ride. We wanted a true cross section of the population, so we went to an elementary school.

[02:12] - Nice. - A beach. - Ready to lose?

[02:25] - I see you have a skull ring. - And to pull my own weight, I even went out and gathered some data of my own. - You owe me $4.

[02:40] - Oh, you sunk my battleship. - How did I not see that?! - I'm actually too good at Jenga.

[02:57] You win. - You lost unless you're going to hurt me, in which case you won. Cut.

[03:12] - OK. - After a few hours of playing, my team was starting to get a real sense of what strategies worked. - Where's Bob?

[03:27] Things got a little crazy at the pool table. - Alright, well thank you for your service. - So I took all their data and video footage, then organized and compiled it to see if I could find

[03:44] And sure enough, after analyzing hundreds of head to head matches, the winning strategy started to emerge. So after narrowing them down to the most effective two or three tricks per game, I took them to the streets.

[03:56] test my strategies against random park players, then go head to head with the final boss of board games. Up till now, these tricks only worked in theory.

[04:09] - What would you like to play? - I was confident my strategies would work, but out of the gate, this kid was cracked, and my - You dirty, dirty dog.

[04:24] - One wrong move and we'd be back to square one on all our strategies. - GG. Next!

[04:38] I won. I feel like you owe me $100. Rock, paper, scissors, shoot.

[04:55] - B9. - A bad sandwich for lunch. - The strategies were working well.

[05:07] - You sunk my battleship. - Next! - That's the one move you don't wanna do.

[05:23] - You cost Mom $100. - Undefeated! - Next!

[05:35] Rock, paper, scissors, shoot. - Now you might have noticed I have yet to lose at rock, paper, scissors.

[05:47] The first is if you challenge your opponent and don't give them much time to think... - And then just say rock, paper, scissors, shoot, it will almost always throw scissors. Maybe because scissors is the last thing they heard and they panic, I don't know.

[06:01] - The second reason is for a less surprised opponent in a best of three situation, because the data shows winners stay and losers switch to the next in line between rock, paper,

[06:13] So to exploit that tendency, all you need to remember is see what won, then beat that one, So for example, if you play paper and they throw rock, you see what won and beat that one,

[06:26] so your next throw should be scissors to beat your previous paper. So if you see what won and beat that one, you should throw a rock to beat the previous scissors

[06:39] Of course this won't guarantee a victory, but in a best of 20, you will statistically win 75% of the time. That's a good one. Careful.

[06:55] Look at that thing wobble. To see who goes first... Tails.

[07:09] Why? - Now you also may have noticed I haven't lost a single coin flip, and I owe this to the third - What's up YouTube?

[07:24] Basically, instead of a fair flip, where the coin will naturally rotate end over end, for the trick flip, you raise your arm and rotate your wrist 45 degrees in the last second,

[07:36] taking on this hourglass-like shape where you'll notice the side that was originally up stays So if the person calls heads before the flip, make sure you start your trick flip with heads facing

[07:49] down, and you'll never lose. - Sure. Next.

[08:02] - Everything was going perfectly according to plan, and the research was paying off. In Tic Tac Toe, I was winning 95% of the time, and in Jenga I won 85% of the time. - 82% of the time.

[08:16] - Eventually, I started dominating games I hadn't even prepared for. - Three, two, one. - Ow, this hurts so bad, Jade.

[08:29] - And I literally just started making up strategies on the fly. I'm actually looking at the reflection in your eyes. Got it.

[08:44] - Everything seemed to be working, but before I went up against a real gaming master, I wanted to do one last check-in with an old friend, the very man who helped me hack Guess Who,

[08:56] and who was so influential in my life that I made him the subject of my TED Talk. mentor, none other than my high school statistics teacher...

[09:08] - Welcome to CrunchLabs. - So I gave this living legend the full CrunchLabs tour he deserved, loud explosions,

[09:22] and of course, a light misting with fart spray. - And then this is the room where we shoot the tennis ball cannon. - I hope so for shooting the cannon.

[09:36] - Actually... Gonna be honest, Mr. Malloy, I didn't invite you out here today for a tour. - A board game ambush.

[09:49] Mr. Malloy became virtually unbeatable, and using a strategy against him, left us deadlocked in tie So now, a decade later, I'm not just going for one win, I'm going for a clean sweep six.

[10:06] - Behind us are six different board games, because it's time for the student to become the teacher. - Prepare to get your butt kicked. For the first game we have...

[10:22] I've played this a couple of times. Rock, paper, scissors, shoot. - Then beat that one.

[10:36] - This was the ultimate test to see if my Connect Four strategies were truly as unpredictable as I thought. - I have prepared a lot for this moment.

[10:54] - Which involved creating a pattern that we'd seen over and over in our data. - And over the course of the game, if you successfully create it, your 4 will connect.

[11:10] - And you forced me into there. - OK, so here's what I did.

[11:22] First thing to know is that the center column is the most important, and you should try to maximize And that's because every possible four in a row needs at least one piece in that center column.

[11:34] It doesn't matter if you win horizontally or diagonally, they all pass through the center column. opponent to spot. And for trick two, we noticed that a bunch of wins in our data included this shape that looks sort of

[11:48] and if you look closely, you can see why this configuration is so unstoppable, because in the act of blocking your first four in a row, they set you up for a second. Now importantly, this beak shape can be upside down, right side up, point to the left or to the right.

[12:03] These will all result in the win, and you'll find that once you know what to look for, it's not that So for Connect Four, here's what to remember, stack the center column, every Connect Four runs And second, build that beak shape because their block sets up your win.

[12:18] - the good news is you have a chance to redeem yourself at... - So we placed our ships and right out of the gate, I was feeling pretty good about my chances.

[12:30] E5. That is a terrible start. - But I wasn't worried because I had a strategy we discovered called checkerboard hunting.

[12:43] Every ship is at least two squares long, so if you imagine a checkerboard pattern on the board, every ship must touch at least one square of the checkerboard pattern. Hunting only on black squares, for example, means you're guaranteed to eventually find all their ships,

[12:58] Then once the two peg ship is sunk, you can stretch the pattern to every third square, since Of course, if you make a hit, you should immediately search the neighboring squares, up,

[13:12] We even created a simulation playing over one million games to test this strategy, we discovered random guessing plus neighbor hunting once you get a hit, which is what most

[13:24] Whereas our checkerboard strategy plus neighbor hunting drops it down to 50 turns, giving you an average advantage of 10 turns, resulting in an almost certain victory.

[13:36] - Miss. - Miss. - Mr. Malloy's luck was bound to run out.

[13:49] Hit. - Hit. You sunk my aircraft carrier, yikes.

[14:01] - You're making a pretty pattern. - You sunk my patrol boat. - Mr. Molloy always seemed one step ahead.

[14:14] - You sunk my patrol boat. You literally hit more than you missed. Instead of just hunting from top to bottom in a checkerboard pattern,

[14:29] he was constantly looking at the available squares and aiming his shots in the center, - The extremities are least likely to hold prey. Towards the middle are squares that are more likely to be covered by ships.

[14:44] - Basically, imagine aligning the remaining ship at every possible configuration left on the board And if you turn those numbers into a heat map, it becomes pretty obvious approximately where you should try next.

[14:59] And if all that sounds too complicated, you basically just shoot towards the middle of the biggest patch of open water, while still just So if you add this strategy on top, Like Mr. Malloy did, you'll win an average of 45 turns,

[15:15] giving you an average advantage of 5 turns over my simple checkerboard strategy. Number one, hunt in a checkerboard pattern. Two, if you hit something, hunt the neighbors.

[15:28] Three, when you sink the small ship, stretch your checkerboard to every third square. And finally, aim for the biggest patch of open water, because it has the highest probability of - Good game.

[15:40] - It's red because you're a villain. Next game, game number three. - According to my data, if I could secure a corner with the first move, my odds of winning improve drastically.

[15:57] - And as fate would have it... - I got incredibly lucky. - Wanna play again?

[16:09] - Looks like it's tails. - Tails - 1/2 to the 4th.

[16:22] - I would say that's unusual. If something was less than 5%, then we call it unusual. Alright then, let's make it unusual

[16:35] - Now that's unusual. - And if Mr. Malloy chose to play any square other than the center, no matter what, victory was mine.

[16:47] - And just like that, the game was over after the first move. - Let's go. - My redemption arc.

[17:02] - With tic tac toe, if you start in any corner, you're guaranteed to win if your opponent goes Anywhere but the middle. The trick is you have to go first.

[17:15] The basic rule is to dominate the corners. So for example, if you go here, the closest non-diagonal corner that threatens a win is here,

[17:27] and once they block you, you go in the remaining corner that threatens two wins, setting a trap just like with Connect Four, where your opponent can't block both and you take home So another example, if they go here, you go in the non-diagonal corner that threatens a win,

[17:41] and once they block you, you once again set up a trap they can't stop. This even works if they go in the opposite corner, because at that point, either non-diagonal corner So the only score where you're not guaranteed a victory is if they go in the middle.

[17:54] But even then, if you choose the diagonal Corner and they go here, you once again lock in the 3rd And honestly, that ends up working about half the time. Number one, go first, which is way easier if you've got a coin lying around, and then pick a corner.

[18:10] And three, lay the trap by going in the remaining corner, setting up a double win. - To the next game.

[18:23] - The most obvious strategy in Jenga is to poke the blocks until you find a loose block that moves By the way, the loose blocks in Jenga aren't a bug, that's a feature.

[18:35] I'd heard they purposefully manufacture them imprecisely to make gameplay more fun. So Connor kindly volunteered to measure the heights of 540 different Jenga blocks, and when we graphed the data, we found the difference in height between them could be as much

[18:49] On top of that, loose pieces regenerate. As you move blocks, the tower's lean moves weight around, so a block that was unmovable 3 turns ago So as the game moves on, make sure you retest everything every turn.

[19:04] I got nothing to lose. That's wild because before that one didn't move.

[19:19] There are no more that easily wiggle. - You've pinned me in a corner, Mr. Malloy. - Eventually you get to a point where you run out of pieces that easily slide out, and you're left with

[19:34] - You're just slowly dragging it. - And from looking at all our data, this stage of the game is what separates the Jenga losers from - No, no, no, no, no!

[19:49] - If you've ever tried to move something really heavy like a couch, you might have noticed the but once it gets moving, it slides pretty easily. In other words, it takes more force to start something sliding than to keep it sliding.

[20:02] So the faster you can get your block sliding, the less time the tower is feeling that initial strong nudge. So our third and final trick is if a block gets stuck, giving it a strong, quick tap or flick is

[20:16] actually much safer than a slow one. - But as it turns out, knowing the science and executing the science are two very different things.

[20:31] - I try to make it so an even number of choices goes to you. There's only four good moves, and then I had three. Two. One. Zero good moves. - Did you teach me that?

[20:46] - Basically what he's saying is you should count the number of movable blocks remaining So for example, let's say it's your turn and there's 4 possible moves left in the stack,

[20:58] you'd want to remove this one, because that leaves your opponent now with an even number of options left. And if you would have pulled the middle block, that would have left them with an odd number of New game!

[21:11] - But first, I would need to thermally undisregulate. - You all cozy now? - And halfway through game two, Mr. Malloy had me backed into the very same corner.

[21:24] You leave me no choice but to use my right hand. Now the rules specifically state you cannot touch these blocks with more than one hand. This uses zero hands.

[21:41] Here, you want one? - Roll the clip. - The plan was an 800 PSI pneumatic Jenga air cannon that cleanly snipes that impossible centerpiece,

[21:54] - By the way, I am currently looking for the world's greatest editor. We pay really well plus you get tons of creative freedom.

[22:07] - So for Jenga, here's what you need to remember. Two, retest every turn because loose blocks regenerate. Three, if a block gets stuck, break it loose quickly, taking advantage of the lower friction.

[22:22] Finally, count the remaining safe moves, just make sure on their turn, there are zero safe moves left. - Thanks, Mark. OK.

[22:36] Monopoly. Playing for four hours and then rage quitting. On that note, you should know the house rules people usually play by.

[22:48] If you play by the actual rules, a two player Monopoly game lasts a little more than 30 minutes. One, there's no free parking jackpot to make everyone flush with cash,

[23:00] if you don't buy a property you land on, the bank immediately auctions it up to the highest bidder - The winners tended to buy everything they landed on.

[23:12] - Why not? Kentucky, come to Papa. - Taking properties off the board if for nothing else, to prevent my opponent from getting a monopoly,

[23:28] because if I'm ever strapped for cash, there's a way to leverage those properties for money. - I can mortgage these, that would raise me $250. Do you really buy Baltic?

[23:45] - Turns out my strategy to buy everything wasn't wrong, it was just very incomplete. - 16 whole dollars. - 450.

[24:01] - Uh oh, with three houses, 550. As long as I don't land on anything bad, I'm OK. What are the chances I get a two or a three?

[24:14] - That's not unusual.

[24:26] - The dice showed zero mercy, officially ending my run and locking down the win for Mr. Malloy. - Clearly, he knew something I didn't. - The trick is getting three houses is the best return on your investment...

[24:41] - Turns out Mr. Malloy had some S-tier monopoly strategies that we totally missed in our research, Build to three houses fast. - Because three houses gives the biggest jump in rent for what you spend.

[24:56] - Additionally, every house you put down is one fewer in the bank's supply, so buying them up This is why World Championship Monopoly games rarely end with hotels on the board.

[25:09] Jail is the most landed on square, and the oranges sit 6, 8, and 9 spaces past it, right around the They're also cheaper to build on, so you can get to three houses faster,

[25:21] and when it comes to jail, pay to get out early in the game so you can keep grabbing properties, but stay in late to avoid paying rent while still collecting it, because that's actually what the And finally, Monopoly is the property trading game, it's right there in the name.

[25:35] So don't be the table bully because it's impossible to win if no one wants to trade with you. One, get to three houses fast. Two, buy orange because thanks to jail, they're the most frequently landed on properties.

[25:52] Three, if you go to jail, get out early in the game but stay in late in the game. And four, trading is the only way to win, and eventually no one wants to trade with a bully. Well done.

[26:05] - So now that Mr. Malloy was ahead, I absolutely needed a win. I was really hoping I'd have more than two wins at this point, but if I know anything, it's how to

[26:17] - This is Squirrel Dash. I'll go first since after all this is my backyard. - Mousetrap was one of my favorite games as a kid, and Squirrel Dash is my new board game inspired by

[26:35] You roll the dice to help the squirrels traverse my backyard obstacle course, collecting acorns as - Because Fat Tail might come along and steal all your nuts, setting off a chain reaction with

[26:50] And although Mr. Malloy picked up the game quick, - I still destroyed him... - Give me the green.

[27:02] - Wow, that feels good. - Unfortunately that goes for everyone else too, you're just gonna have to figure it out. That looks like a tie to me.

[27:17] - Once again, we were too evenly matched, but 10 years of anticipation was not gonna end in another tie. - It would all come down to this, six months of grueling in the field, hands-on data gathering

[27:31] I would have to reach in my back pocket for one final piece of strategy I had saved. - To dethrone the king himself.

[27:43] - That's actually true. There's absolutely no strategy here, you just button mash.

[28:10] So it would all come down to one last marble. I had planned for everything, every hack, every trick, every tactic, but in the end, perhaps after making a mockery of Lady Luck one too many times, Mister Malloy...

[28:26] Had the hungrier, hungry hippo, which meant for all my years of preparation, I was still being - Mr. Malloy, you're a legend. This is what a good teacher looks like.

[28:42] And now you too know how to beat anybody at any of these games as long as that person isn't Mr. Malloy, or I suppose me or anyone who watched this video.