[Icehouse] Martian Coasters Question - Seeking Other's Thoughts

[Daniel W. Johnson]

At 11:14 -0600 2006-12-16, Carol Townsend wrote:
>Actually I've found that this is usually a result of a defensive 
>move.  Medium Yellow Mid (as per previous examples) stays on the 
>Blue Center and continually digs to the top to "get between" Blue 
>mids. 
>
>I'm often just trying to get all my Blue 'Mids onto my coaster - and 
>then into the center - I'll worry about stacking order later if I 
>have to.

I worked out that once you have all your pyramids in the center of 
your coaster, your opponents can not drop your probability of winning 
on any given turn below 7/12.  Keeping the probability that low 
requires that they keep putting at least one blocking piece at the 
top of your stack (typically by digging a pawn each turn).  And since 
any blocking piece is at least 2 turns away from winning, this means 
either desperation or giving up on winning.

And as a double-check: Movement is one space at a time?  You can't 
use three movement points to move your pawn three spaces in the 
direction of one of its current arrows?  (Or in the photo on the web 
page, using two movement points to dig the yellow drone to the top 
and then four more to move it on top of the yellow pawn.)
-- 
Daniel W. Johnson
panoptes at iquest.net
http://members.iquest.net/~panoptes/
039 53 36 N / 086 11 55 W