Tips schroedingerscats

Summary: Guess what cards everyone is likely to have based on the distribution and how many cards everyone is holding. The bidding chart on the board shows what bids outrank each other (green/dead outranks pink/alive and orange/boxes rank double because there's fewer of those cards) so bids to the right or down from the circled bid are higher. If you think it is likely there are more of a type of card than the current bid (especially based off the cards in your hand combined with what you learn from what everyone else is willing to bid) then you bid higher than the last person. You can try to increase the chances of your bid being correct by revealing some of your cards (giving more information to the other players), but letting you then discard and redraw the cards left in your hand (giving you new information that the other players don't have). You can also use your physicist card to directly change the cards counted in the round (experiment), but you can only use them once for the whole game. They don't come back between rounds. If you think the previous bid is actually unlikely, you can challenge the bid, which ends the round, everyone shows their cards, and either the bidder or the challenger is correct. The one (bidder or challenger) who is incorrect is eliminated from the game and a new round starts.

Tips:

-Remember your Cat Physicist card can only be used once per GAME (they don't come back each round), so use it wisely!

-Note that it is very easy to make an impossible bid: the size of the findings rapidly decreases as players are knocked out and some of the bids go beyond the base number of cards! For instance, it's only possible to get 26 alive/dead cats if ALL four Heisenbergs are in hands, plus all 20 of that card type, AND someone has played a Cat Physicist card that adds 2 to the findings! Pay attention to what cards can even possibly be in play...

-There are 52 cards in the deck, so if it helps, think about them like normal playing cards: ---Ace-10 cards are alive/dead cats (40 cards) - think of all the red numbers as alive (20 cards) and all the black numbers as dead (20 cards) ---Jack & Queen cards are boxes (8 cards) and the King cards (4 cards) are Heisenbergs (wilds) This might help with your expectations of how likely a card is to be in someone's hand if you've played more games with the standard deck.

-Putting down cards does reveal extra information to the other players about how likely your bid is, but then you get to redraw the other cards in your hand and change the likelihood - remember you don't just now know new information that the other players don't, but you ALSO know cards you got rid of that ARE NOT available to anyone! Keep this in mind for future bids!

-Alive and Dead each have about 38.5% chance of showing up, Boxes have about 15% chance of showing up, and then the Heisenbergs have about 7-8% chance of showing up and they always support the current bid. So accounting for the Heisenbergs, Alive/Dead is a 38-42% chance each and boxes are a 15-19% chance of showing up (and yes that adds up to more than 100% on the high end because Heisenbergs can count as any).