God's Imitator

Cheng Wen followed Lin Sizhi into the ’Sea Minesweeper’ room and looked around.

The layout here was quite simple.

On the wall were four square screens, which should be used to play ’Single Player Mode’.

In addition, in the center of the room were four different battle stations. Each battle station could support two-player combat, with seating and operable display screens in duplicate, facing each other.

In other words, this room could support a maximum of 12 players playing games simultaneously.

However, so far, only Lin Sizhi and Cheng Wen had entered the room. Other players had been immediately discouraged by the rake and transaction tax hidden in this room.

Besides this, the God’s Imitator who designed this game room had committed a major taboo: he hadn’t used gambling equipment or board games, but instead adopted this semi-original game type.

Actually, Cheng Wen had already recognized the prototype of this game: a classic game called ’Battleship’. However, compared to various common gambling equipment and board games, it was relatively niche.

Moreover, this God’s Imitator had actually changed the gameplay somewhat.

According to the original ’Battleship’ gameplay, players placed battleships on a 10×10 grid, and these battleships were all long strips, just of different lengths.Ranging from occupying 2 squares to occupying 5 squares.

Although ’Sea Minesweeper’ had changed the name and packaging, it was actually just old wine in a new bottle. The gameplay was still the same old thing.

The biggest difference was that the originally all strip-shaped battleships were changed to differently shaped mine zones.

The shapes of these mine zones were somewhat like ’Tetris’. Except for the ’Small Mine Zone’ and ’Continuous Mine Zone’ which remained strip-shaped, the other three types of mine zones became ’three diagonally adjacent squares’, ’square-shaped squares’, and ’T-shaped squares’.

For Cheng Wen, games like ’Battleship’ didn’t really have any good strategies to begin with, because it was hard to guess how the opponent would specifically arrange things.

Take the current rules of ’Sea Minesweeper’ for example. There were five types of mine zones players could place, totaling 18 squares, while the entire map had 100 squares.

Unless both sides knew each other well and knew each other’s placement habits in advance, whether you could win this game largely depended on luck.

What’s more, this game changed the strip-shaped battleships into irregular mine zones, which would further increase the difficulty of the game.

Because according to the original rules, battleships were strip-shaped. After hitting one square, you just needed to continue searching vertically or horizontally.

But in this game, there were many irregular shapes. After hitting one square, it could be horizontal, vertical, or diagonal, which undoubtedly further increased the difficulty.

If playing single player mode, all mine zones were randomly placed by the system. Playing it would likely be more difficult than playing with a real person. After all, real people might have some preferences, while system random placement had none.

If playing two-player mode, this game was too deserted. Plus with the completely unknown rake, no one was willing to battle.

So Cheng Wen himself would absolutely not proactively play in this game room.

But then again, since Lin Sizhi had proactively entered this game room...

That meant there were some rules that Cheng Wen hadn’t noticed.

Lin Sizhi didn’t mind Cheng Wen following behind him. He didn’t seem to have any plans to play ’Two-Player Battle Mode’, but instead went straight to the ’Single Player Mode’ area and casually selected a display screen.

After investing 500 chips, he could officially start the game.

In ’Single Player Mode’, players would automatically play the role of the side ’detecting mine zones’, meaning they just needed to keep clicking squares.

The only requirement was to find all mine zones within 60 clicks.

If successfully found, they could obtain 5,000 chips (rake must be deducted).

If unable to find them, the 500 chips would be gone.

Cheng Wen was somewhat puzzled because he felt this was a game with very low chances of winning.

There were a total of 100 squares, and you needed to use 60 clicks to find 18 squares. It didn’t seem very reliable.

...

Lin Sizhi casually selected a position relatively close to the center on the 10×10 grid and clicked.

The square changed from its original white to gray, but the ’mine’ icon didn’t appear, which meant his luck wasn’t very good and he hadn’t hit directly on the first try.

But Lin Sizhi didn’t mind. Instead, he selected an area slightly farther away and clicked again.

At the same time, Lin Sizhi said, ”Actually, your speculation is generally fine.

”The higher the ’rake’ and ’transaction tax’, the sooner the game gets eliminated. And the ’Sea Minesweeper’ game doesn’t display rake and transaction tax, which indeed gives people a feeling of ’having a guilty conscience’.

”But what if, from a mechanical standpoint, this game has a surefire winning method and can obtain stable returns?”

Cheng Wen was very surprised, ”Surefire winning method? Stable returns? Are you talking about this single player mode?”

Lin Sizhi nodded, ”Yes. No matter how the mine zones are randomly generated, 60 clicks are enough to find the 18-square mine zones.

”Of course, the prerequisite is executing relatively simple, basic strategies. You can’t click completely randomly.”

Cheng Wen instinctively wanted to ask ”what specifically is the strategy,” but felt that asking this way was somewhat presumptuous.

Since Lin Sizhi hadn’t chased him away, that meant he didn’t mind him watching.

So Cheng Wen still observed carefully and tried hard to think about the principles involved.

During this time, he looked somewhat worriedly through the glass wall of the room at the situation outside.

Other players had already entered other rooms one after another to start games. Time was passing minute by minute. There were still only Cheng Wen and Lin Sizhi in the ’Sea Minesweeper’ room, which made him instinctively feel nervous and worried, with a feeling of being abandoned by the main force.

But after thinking about it, Cheng Wen still decided to stay and continue observing how Lin Sizhi would play this game.

Soon, Cheng Wen understood the strategy Lin Sizhi was employing.

This strategy was indeed very simple. It was impossible not to understand it.

First, Lin Sizhi would prioritize clicking in positions relatively toward the middle area of the 10×10 map to ’detect mine zones’.

If no mine zone was found, he would click again with a slight gap of three or four squares.

If a mine zone was found, he would prioritize detecting horizontally or vertically adjacent squares, then detect diagonally adjacent squares.

After ruling out a certain specific shape, Lin Sizhi would slightly change some strategies: change the search interval, or change to prioritizing detection of diagonal squares.

Obviously, he had only performed very simple thinking and hadn’t added anything too complex in terms of game theory.

But even so, he still successfully found all the mine zones on the 56th click.

A celebratory victory notification sound rang out on the screen. At the same time, the coin outlet next to it clattered out some chips.

Lin Sizhi took them in his hand and did a simple count.

A total of 3,500 chips.

Cheng Wen was somewhat surprised, ”3,500! Doesn’t that mean the rake is actually 30%? Indeed very exploitative!

”But then again, we did earn 3,000 chips.

”The only question is, what if luck becomes worse next time?”

Lin Sizhi didn’t respond. He just continued to invest 500 chips and started a new game.