Thursday, June 07, 2007

Hey! Some Of Those Are My Fish!

I played Hey! That's My Fish! against Scrabblette and my sister the other evening. At the beginning sister suggested that they gang up on me. As I squeezed her penguin for room she remarked "he's like a gang all by himself". I isolated one of sister's penguins very quickly and she saw how it was done. The two of them then played pretty well eventually leaving one of my penguins on an ice floe by himself. I tried very hard to carve out a good territory for myself but they wouldn't let me. It was very close.

For the final scoring, I noticed that there were 6 fish in the box (unreachable, so nobody scored them). That left 94 points in the game, and I had 32. The pigeonhole principle tells us that for me to win, they had to have 31 each. Scrabblette announced she had 31. Woohoo!

I like H!TMF! a lot but I wonder how deep it is. I suspect very very good players are only a tiny bit better than very good players, unlike Chess for example. There are certain principles that you need to play by and once you've mastered those you're basically competitive. Let's see which I can remember:

1. Realise that if a penguin is on a space that space is already taken.

2. Fracture the ice so that you have more penguins on the big side.

3. Interpose your penguins so that your opponent has to go around them instead of past them, because that will cost them an extra move and you can be doing something else in that time.

4. Always cramp your opponent for room.

Other ideas welcome.

2 comments:

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...

I figured the same thing too, until I tried it on BSW and got my ass carved, deep fried and handed to me on a platter.