Observations on strategies for Goofspiel

Abstract

Goofspiel is a zero-sum two player card game in which all information is known by both players. Many strategies exist that leverage random, deterministic, and learning approaches to play, however, no strategy dominates all others. It has been suggested that a hybrid strategy combining two or more of these approaches may provide better results than any of these alone. In this note, we review the strengths and weaknesses of each traditional strategy and make a cursory evaluation of a hybrid `Good' strategy.