Experimental College

Instructor Spotlight: Madison Verner

Madison Verner is a senior majoring in Pure Mathematics, Political Science, and Psychology. Her course aims to answer the question: “How can probability help you find the optimal strategy to win at your favorite game?”
A young woman with long brown hair and a plaid blazer rests their chin on their hand and smiles at the camera while leaning on a green felt poker table beside stacks of red and teal chips

What do you think is the hardest strategy game and why?

Bridge! When I first tried to learn the game on my tenth birthday, I had to run upstairs to my room crying because I was so frustrated with trying to understand the bidding. I had been watching my family play for years, and I wanted to be able to play with everyone else, but it felt like I could never understand the game! However, I know there are a lot of games that people have cried over.

What truly makes bridge the most difficult game is that you can never truly finish learning it. Every time I open my bridge app, I end up learning a new bidding convention or strategy. Instead of it being a game you learn once, it’s a game you continue learning for the rest of your life.

What is the game of bridge and how do you play?

You can think of bridge as a gambling game, primarily because I think it helps to understand it that way. Bridge is a trick-based card game, like hearts, Euchre, or 45s. There are 4 players, each with 13 cards. Each player plays one card on every ‘trick,’ and the highest card from the suit lead wins the trick. The exception to this rule is when a player does not have the suit lead and plays the ‘trump’ suit, which beats all other suits.

In bridge, players play in teams with the person across from them. The goal is to win the highest number of tricks with the person across from you that you can. The part that becomes interesting is that you and your partner bet how many tricks you think you can make. During this bidding stage, you also have to communicate qualities of your hand to your partner to come up with the best bid through code. This is the part of the game that is the most interesting and the most difficult!

What are some of your other favorite strategy-based games and why?

That’s a really good question, and I am always here for recommendations! If you love video games, there are a lot of good board games that have similar mechanics to video games. If you like Slay the Spire, you would probably like Dominion, the best deck-builder card game. If you like HOI-IV or other games where you want to take over the world, I recommend Risk or Small World (one of my favorites). For people who want to do space themed games, I think Terraforming Mars, Twilight Imperium, and Cosmic Encounter have been hugely popular with my friends.

There are also a lot of good strategy games if you want to learn as you play. If you like to study women’s history, Votes for Women is a really underrated game, but it is very unbalanced for the suffragettes. Wingspan is a really good game for bird nerds, and a lover of dragons may like their alternative of Wyrmspan. If you love all things transit, Pan Am, Sky Team, Ticket to Ride, or String Railway have been great classics for me to come back to.

In general, if you look on BoardGameGeek, you can find yourself a bunch of games in all categories that will fit your interest. I suggest searching around to find something that seems cool!