Different Forms of Imbalance in Strongly Playable Discrete Games II: Multi-Player RPS Games

TL;DR

This paper explores various forms of imbalance in multi-player Rock-Paper-Scissors games, demonstrating that certain game configurations are highly balanced or imbalanced depending on the number of players, with implications for game design.

Contribution

It extends previous work by analyzing multi-player RPS variants, proposing a conjecture about their playability, and identifying conditions for maximal imbalance as players increase.

Findings

Most balanced two-player n-object RPS games identified

Multi-player RPS games can be strongly playable under certain conditions

Imbalance measures reach maximum as number of players approaches infinity

Abstract

Classic Rock-Paper-Scissors, RPS, has seen many variants and generalizations in the past several years. In the previous paper, we defined playability and balance for games. We used these definitions to show that different forms of imbalance agree on the most balanced and least balanced form of playable two-player n-object RPS games, referred to as (2,n)-RPS. We reintroduce these definitions here and show that, given a conjecture, the generalization of this game for m<50 players is a strongly playable RPS game. We also show that this game maximizes these forms of imbalance in the limit as the number of players goes to infinity.