Saturday, August 26, 2006

Ro-Sham-Bo-Fu strategy

If you've read my post about Getting paid to play games, then you must know how excited I was about Moola.com which is the first site (that I know of) who offers people money to play games.
Having played their games for a while now, I have figured out a strategy for playing one of their games named Ro-Sham-Bo-Fu which is an advanced version of rock,paper and scissors.
If you haven't played Ro-Sham-Bo-Fu before then I suggest you try it out first and then return here for your Ro-Sham-Bo-Fu strategy guide.

The strategy:
In each of the 6 rounds of the game you must choose either rock,paper or scissors. Rock loses to paper but beats scissors, Paper beats rock but loses to scissors and scissors beat paper but loses to rock. In each round the grandmaster offers you additional points for not choosing a specific selection (e.g rock) but what this means is that given that most players will want those additional points they are left only with 2 choices of which one always beats the other. My strategy for this is to choose that dominant option (in the case that rock is excluded, you should always choose scissors).

Let's take a look at a potential round where paper is the excluded option.
If paper is excluded then we are left with only rock and scissors of which rock always beats scissors. The wise choice would be to select rock anytime.

  • If your opponent selects scissors then you win and gain 3 points while both of you get 2 points for not using paper.
  • If your opponent selects rock then you have a tie and the points move to the next round.
  • If your opponent selects paper the he wins the 3 points but you get 2 points for not using paper.
Note: in the case of a tie, you might want to break this strategy and choose the excluded option which might give you the 2 round points (6 points) but lose the 2 point bonus.


Related posts:
Getting paid to play games


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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have had luck with picking randomly what I am going to play each turn before starting the game.

Ohad Gliksman said...

I think my strategy is better then a random picking unless faced with a opponent who already knows this strategy and reacts to it.

Anonymous said...

ohad, I have to say that that is a very stupid strategy.

Allison said...

Actually, my strategy is that most people will choose the dominant one, so I choose the one that you don't get a bonus on and beat it.

Anonymous said...

as a matter of fact, i have found that usually this strategy will not work. i have won 13 straight games using my own strategy. in the first round, your opponent will almost never take the bonus. this is somewhat counter-intuitive, but it's what i have found. so if the bonus is for not using paper, the opponent will use paper. therefore, you should use scissors. that way, you will win the 3 points for the round, plus the two point bonus. after that, you should not take the bonus. finally, the final four rounds have no particular rule, you should judge based on your opponent's strategy. like i said, i have won 13 straight games playing this way, and 27 of my last 30 games. the hint is, play on the low levels. on the higher levels, it's far more random.