Cryptid Hunter
by Adam Wade, Alex Kutza, Skye Murrell
I hung out with the Seattle/Tacoma IF group while they played through this, and also the Oxford/London IF group. Examine six different locations and pick which three cryptids you think are the “legendary” ones that you’re supposed to capture. You had three vague descriptive terms for each cryptid on your shopping list, and these felt like the right amount of vagueness and the right amount of “this description could match a couple different cryptids that we’ve seen.”
But… the tags claim it’s “highly replayable” and I feel like they didn’t do the math on that? With a group it was fun to see it twice because people had different reactions to various things. But if you’re playing it by yourself? You should only play this once.
The locations and the cryptids which live in each one are static; you get the exact same world to explore each time. The only thing that changes is which ones you’re looking for. So… on the face of things, if you capture three cryptids one time, then there are only three more that you haven’t captured. At most you could only play it twice with completely separate clues.
But they don’t do that: I’m pretty sure they just give you a random set of three. So… (6*5*4) / (3*2*1) is 20 possible sets of three cryptids. On your second game:
- One is the set you just saw.
- One is the set you haven’t seen.
- The other 18 are split evenly: 9 sets where you’ve seen one, 9 sets where you’ve already seen two.
So even if you only play twice, there’s a 95% chance that you’ll know at least one of the answers the second time, and a 50% chance that you’ll know at least two of them.
On the other hand, adding the randomization is a pretty significant chunk of work for a game that someone is only going to play once. So that’s a tough call for the authors. Yay for the birthday paradox!
Edit: oh, DemonApologist has already pointed this out. Yup.