Tim Chase on Nostr: Playing a Candyland-like game with dear daughter, we were curious how many rounds it ...

Playing a Candyland-like game with dear daughter, we were curious how many rounds it would take before someone would win.

So I cranked out a quickie C program to model the board and player positions/state (lose a turn, get an extra turn) and fired off the simulation.

Verdict after 10000 games:
With 1 solo player, it could be finished as quickly as 14 rounds and as many as 70+ (theoretically an infinite number if you keep hitting the "back to the start" square).

With 2 players, it came out between 14 and ~40 rounds pretty consistently.

With 3 players, 14–30.

With more players, that upper drops rapidly toward the lower-bound because even if lots of players have bad luck, the coin-toss balances out, so with 300 players, someone wins consistently within 15 rounds.

As a bonus, the C program regularly compiled at nearly every step along the way (which is often rare for me), and not a single segfault, out-of-bounds, or other treacherous fault. 😎