Game of Rows

If you want to test yourself and see if you're good at strategic thinking, you should definitely play Game of Rows.

In this app you will play a series of toy games, each of which representing a particular situation of strategic interaction. These games are designed to extract and mimic the strategic part of many real-life interpersonal interactions where some mixture of conflict and cooperation is present.

When does it pay-off to be tough and aggressive and when is it better to coordinate your actions with others? Is it better to be altruistic or mind only your own interest? When is it profitable to take a risky action and when should you be conservative and security-driven?

Who will be better in the game? A math genius like John Nash - one of the fathers of game theory - or a psychologist like Sigmund Freud who can read the minds of other people?

Try yourself by playing Game of Rows! Your opponents will be real people who – like you – decided to try out Game of Rows. You will be asked to choose one of several actions available to you. Your score in a given game will depend both on the choice made by you and by your opponent who – like you – was asked to choose one of several actions available to her/him.

Be smart and try to outwit the others! The ranking score will tell you how good you are. It is especially designed to reduce – like in bridge tournaments – the effect of luck in order to better measure your strategic skills: it depends only on how you perform against those players who played or will play (ranking updates continuously) the same games in the same position as you.

We invite you to play, to think and to do your best to outwit others. Improve your strategic skills as well as your ranking score. Perhaps you reach the top of the ranking and become the best player.

What do we have of this?

We are scientists doing research in decision theory. By analyzing the choices you have made, we will try to understand how decisions are really made.

Game theory tells us how a game should be played optimally by both players (it is called the Nash equilibrium) assuming that the players live in the super-rational world (called common knowledge of rationality).

But what if you can’t be certain as to whether your opponent is rational or just chose some action at random or by mistake or maybe she/he doesn’t know similar things about you?

Is it still optimal to play what game theory tells you to play? Can you outwit the mathematician by correctly correctly predicting choices of others and use that to your advantage?