Find the best game tactic against an other tactic, for example in the card game Toepen

Question

I want to test some card game tactics against each other, my goal is to know witch tactic would be better in real live. To do this I made a simulation, but I don't know if I made a good one. So I would like to know how to create a good simulation.

You can’t simulate every factor that is pressed in real life, for example bluffing. There are also some factors that can be eliminate, I eliminated as many as possible. The factors that are left, like bluffing, are out of scope. It's impossible to simulate those.

I use my simulation project to compare some tactics against each other. This way you can see what tactic you could use against an other tactic. The downside of this is that you only can use this if you know the tactic of the other player. When you don't know what tactic you can use against it, then you need to have a computer to test it. So you only can use this project to review your playing style.

This question is not about creating a “god tactic”, but it is about writing good simulation software that can be used to simulate for example card games. So I would like to know how you can make a good simulation:

• What do I need to take along?
• How could you know that your simulation is a good simulation?
• How should I process situations? Generate for example some random hands, or try all possibilities.

Answer 1

Answers to your three questions:

1. Factors like cards sticking together and different shuffle techniques shouldn't really matter. I assume you would model the shuffling by using a pseudorandom noise source (like rand()) to randomize the order of the cards. Most shuffling techniques are probably good enough that that's a perfectly sufficient model for your purposes.

2. I don't know the game well enough to know how simply the strategies can be described. The test that you described should answer the question of which of those tactics will win when they go head-to-head. If those are the only two strategies, and they are simple enough that they can be completely implemented, then yes, your test will tell you which is better. If this game is like most such games and involves lots of different strategies and subtleties, then knowing which of these two strategies will win when the two go head-to-head probably won't tell you much about which is actually the better strategy.

3. I basically covered this in my answer to your second question, but if you have programmed the tactics 100% correctly, then the results of the bot face-off will be useful in that they will tell you which of those two strategies will win more often when they go head-to-head. I think that in most games like this, though, that alone does not tell you much about how good the strategy is overall. Again, I don't know enough about this game to say with certainty, but if the game involves many possible strategies, the test probably won't tell you much that's super useful.