text:
Is "Adversarial Policies Beat Professional-Level Go AIs" simply wrong?
Since 2016, when AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, probably the world's strongest player, humans have essentially not had a chance against a well-trained AI.
Now, a paper "Adversarial Policies Beat Professional-Level Go AIs" has been uploaded to the ArXiv. Ars Technica provides a nontechnical account: "New Go-playing trick defeats world-class Go AI—but loses to human amateurs". If I understand correctly, the idea is that the adversary takes a small territory in the corner, leaving the larger part to the victim AI, but the adversary plays dead stones in the larger rest of the board. The victim AI, on the one hand, sees these stones as dead, and therefore does not invest moves in killing them. But during scoring, the victim AI apparently does not see them as dead and therefore does not count the large territory as territory.
Here is an example from the Ars Technica article:

Note on the right that the AI believes that black wins by 49.5 points. There are 6.5 points komi, so black should win by 56 points on the board. For the life of me, I can't figure this out - the top right corner is 52 points large and there are no captures. And more importantly, any player of 20-kyu strength or stronger immediately sees that the black stones scattered in the huge white territory are simply, unquestionably, dead - so prior to counting, they should be removed and count as captures for white under any reasonable set of rules.
For instance, the 2002 English language Chinese rules per the link on this page at sensei's say that "After all dead stones are removed from the board, count...". The complete AGA rules say that the players must agree on the status of all stones, and agreed-upon dead stones are removed.
Thus, it seems to me like this does not exploit a weakness in KataGo's go playing ability, but a bona fide bug in its game-end territory counting algorithm. It's rather obviously a bug, because the rules are clear on what should happen in this situation when we count the score, and KataGo obviously does not follow the rules.
The paper notes that they are following the rules of go as codified by John Tromp. I am not conversant with these rules, but it seems to me that if under this codification, the situation above is scored as a win for black, that reflects a weakness in this codification.
It does not make sense to me to publish this under a headline of "beating" KataGo, rather as "we found a bug in the game-end scoring of KataGo" or "we found a surprising consequence of a common codification of the rules of go".
What am I missing?

The Tao of Gaming (which I love) talks about it:  "...can be tricked into ending the game (via passing) in a position that looks dominant but actually scores against them."

@user253751: trust me, they are. Of course, a 9p (professional 9th dan player) playing against a 30-kyu (someone who has just learned the rules) would probably get some of them to live, e.g., the three ones in the middle, so "dead" always depends to a degree on the relative strength of the two players. But in a situation where someone/-thing plays an even game against KataGo, these stones are stone dead. (I have been playing go for 30 years and am about 1-kyu.)

I don't think there is a clear boundary where players above a certain strength know they are dead; I would expect most beginners to think the stones can live, and most dan players to know they can't. Many in between might think either or be unsure. I think most players learn this just by being told, or by specifically practicing trying to live or kill in such circumstances. It's hard for a kyu player to learn this knowledge from actual play, because against other kyu players they can live sometimes, and against dan players, their stones' death is easily explained by the opponent's strength.

It was not mentioned here yet, but I think it is critically important: The paper says "We were only able to perform a manual exploit when the friendlyPassOk flag in KataGo was set to true. This flag makes KataGo more willing to pass. However, this flag is set to false in all of our training and evaluation runs."

I would rather hear from the KataGo team about this than the team that wrote the paper, frankly.

One of the authors of the paper here. It might shock you to find that I believe the paper was not "simply wrong". I do however think that we did a poor job explaining our evaluation setting, and we plan to rectify that in a paper revision soon. This rule set issue has tripped a lot of people up.
First, I want to clarify what we were trying to investigate in the paper was whether AI systems that in typical situations can outperform humans can still suffer from surprising and non-human failure modes. As another answer to this post notes, machine learning systems in general are often vulnerable to adversarial attack. But in many cases these machine learning systems are vulnerable to, well, a lot of other things: e.g. image classifiers often fail when you change the camera angle, lighting, etc. So it's natural to wonder whether these failures just reflect the system not really being "smart enough" and that it'd go away with more data, bigger models, etc.
We picked Go as an evaluation environment because there are very strong Go-playing AI systems, that can beat the best human players. Moreover, these AI systems haven't just been strong in "the lab" in a controlled tournament setting. They're also used in the real world by many thousands of Go afficionados as a teaching aid, a fun opponent to play against, etc. As any software developer can tell you, a large user base is an excellent (if sometimes painful) way of discovering bugs in your system. So, it's notable that people have for the most part not found many ways of beating these AI systems by hand -- although there are some, e.g. one of the authors of KataGo in his excellent response on Reddit describes "Mi Yuting's flying dagger" opening pattern that some earlier otherwise very strong Go AI systems struggled to handle.
This preamble is to say: our primary focus was to learn something about machine learning, not about Go. Because of this, we aimed to pick an evaluation setting that is fair for KataGo, but not one that necessarily corresponds to human play. This I think is the root of the confusion you and many others experienced. In retrospect we should have expected this, and we're actually working on a follow-up attack now that also wins under standard Chinese/Japanese rule sets.
With that out of the way, what is our evaluation setting, and why do we think it's a reasonable thing to do? We used Tromp-Taylor rules, modified to remove opponent stones from within groups that can be shown to be unconditionally alive via Benson's algorithm. This is the same as "Tromp-Taylor Rules" with "SelfPlay Opts" turned on at the KataGo rules page.
We picked this ruleset as it was the one used during KataGo's original training run reported on in their paper. Our understanding is that later training runs randomized the ruleset to enable KataGo to better transfer to play under human rules, but it still made up a significant fraction of later training data. Crucially, KataGo does know the ruleset it's playing under: it's a configuration option.
A human player might wonder why these strange AI researchers are obsessed with Tromp-Taylor rules. They're often called the "logical rules of Go" because they're simple, which is appealing to a certain kind of person obsessed with Kolmogorov complexity. But the main reason is that it allows for automatic scoring of board games.
Under typical human play, players will decide which stones are dead or alive at the end of the game. That works well for players who know what they're doing. But systems like KataGo learn to play Go from scratch. What does a randomly initialized neural network do here? It'll make completely random predictions about which stones are dead or alive. If we then use these nonsense predictions to train the system -- well, garbage in, garbage out. So, this human convention has a serious bootstrapping problem.
Of course, once the system has learned something about Go, you could switch to a more human style of play. And indeed KataGo configured to play against humans does do this -- it has an auxiliary head of the network that predicts what stones are dead or alive, that it's learned from experience over many games. But it's still risky to use it as an optimization target. If KataGo has a particular blindspot in its dead/alive evaluation, then that blindspot will just get reinforced as it plays against itself.
Tromp-Taylor avoids this problem by, well, just forcing the game to be played out to the end. That'd be annoying to a human, but AI's are quite good at not getting bored. It is a waste of compute and slows down training, which is where KataGo's SelfPlayOpts kicks in. If it can show (not predict, but actually have a guarantee) that a particular group of stones is unconditionally alive (under any sequence of future legal moves) then it'll remove opposing stones within that group. These are stones that are provably dead.
Let's look at the game from the ArsTechnica article quoted in the OP:

Under Tromp-Taylor rules (whether the original, or the "modified" version used by KataGo) this is a win for black, the adversary. But if they were playing in any human tournament, it'd surely be called a win for white. What's the difference here?
Well, the black stones in the lower-left are clearly very weak. They could be captured by white with little work. Black's territory in the top-right looks fairly secure, but it's pretty small. So, a polite pair of human players would agree the black stones in the lower-left are dead, and declare a win for white. If they really couldn't agree, a referee might be called, or the match might restart.
However, the white territory in the lower-left isn't "unconditionally alive" in the sense of Benson's algorithm. If the white player plays sufficiently badly (you can imagine it's trying to lose, even), then it could lose that territory. So, the black stones in the lower-left territory don't get removed under KataGo's "SelfPlayOpts".
Scoring then proceeds with regular Tromp-Taylor rules. This scoring rule gives points for each stone of the color (which is about even between black and white), plus the number of empty points that reach only that color (this is none for white, but black gets all of the top-right). So, black wins.
Now this does all feel rather contrived from a human perspective. But remember, KataGo was trained with this rule set, and configured to play with it. It doesn't know that the "human" rules of Go are any more important than Tromp-Taylor. In general, we want AI systems to do well at the thing we trained them to do: if they fail at that, but do great at some unrelated task, that's interesting, but not very reassuring.
However, it's an interesting question whether we can find attacks that work under human rules, too. After all, our adversary wasn't trying to win under human rules -- what if we just train it do so? Our provisional results suggest we can, with around a 98% win rate (a bit lower than the 99% in the original paper, but not too bad!) Here's a sneak peek of one game (white is victim, black is adversary). We definitely need to dig more into this before we're confident in the results, but wanted to share it as it may be more interesting from a Go perspective.
Although I can't quite argue for this paper being simply wrong, I do think there is one major limitation: the problem we discover disappears if the victim does enough search. Now even without search KataGo is very strong (we estimate top-1000 professional). So, it's interesting an AI can be so strong and so weak at the same time. But, we've certainly not broken all of computer Go, although we plan to see how far we can push the attack against victims with search (they may still be vulnerable, but it just be harder to find the attack).

Adam, thanks a lot for taking the time to write up such a long and detailed answer. I truly appreciate this and now think I understand better where you are coming from and where I got confused. I particularly like your explanation about just why the Tromp-Taylor ruleset does what it does in the context of computer go. I apologize for the clickbaity title ("wrong") and hope you won't hold it against me. All the best for your paper, I'm looking forward to reading future or published versions (maybe you'd like to mention any such here?)!

I'm glad you found the response useful! We have a somewhat clickbaity paper title so I think we deserve clickbait questions about us :) I'll be sure to post paper updates to this thread.

So the bug is not in the evaluation of the end situation, but in deciding to stop playing here (as by just continuing, it could have killed thos stones).

@PaŭloEbermann, which raises the question of why exactly it decides to stop playing? The article mentions "tricking KataGo into ending the game prematurely", even though it "predicts a high win probability for itself". But if it knows the rules, it should know that the current immediate position is losing, however positive an outlook it has. Well, at least if it bothers to actually evaluate the current position to begin with. And with the explicit mention that this is the ruleset it was trained on, I'm not sure I really get it, why does it pass?

I get the part about machine learning learning just what it was trained on, and odd results coming from that in general if it's given situations outside that training. But having stray dead stones inside your own territory doesn't seem such an odd situation in general, it should happen to some extent in normal games too. Or...?

Question about this part: "We used Tromp-Taylor rules, modified to remove opponent stones from within groups that can be shown to be unconditionally alive via Benson's algorithm." What specifically do you mean by "from within"? It is certainly possible for stones to be surrounded by living stones, without being dead themselves.

"We have a somewhat clickbaity paper title" - uh, understate much? I can't even make heads or tails of the title: "New Go-playing trick defeats world-class Go AI—but loses to human amateurs". Meaning, KataGo can defeat AlphaGo but humans can still beat KataGo? ...  @OP, An "open source Go-playing AI" has bugs? Say it ain't so....

“But remember, KataGo was trained with this rule set, and configured to play with it.” this is suspicious. Does katago really configured to play with this rule in the case of the match in the image? If my memory is correct, the katago program has a setting about choosing pass when it feels a great advantage. This setting does not come from the training of the network, it is not for Tromp-Taylor rule, you should close this setting when you want to test katago in Tromp-Taylor rule.

Regardless of the validity of this particular strategy, the general technique seems quite valid.
They did not simply discover a bug in KataGo and then write a program to exploit the bug. Rather, they trained another AI to beat KataGo.
It's well known that neural networks used for image classification are vulnerable to adversarial inputs. Given an image classification AI, an attacker can train an image to be strongly recognized as, say, a banana. The image is likely to look nothing like a banana, but nonetheless is strongly recognized as one by the AI. The paper linked in the first sentence includes many example pictures. These pictures are called "adversarial inputs" or "adversarial examples."
This problem seems to be inherent to neural networks as nobody has found a surefire way to avoid it. It's concerning for self-driving cars, because a piece of paper taped to a STOP sign could cause the car to think it's a 150kmph speed limit instead.
Normally these classifiers are pretty good because adversarial examples are very specific random-looking images which nobody would stumble across by accident - but we know how to create them. Adversarial examples can be created by a similar procedure to AI training, but instead of updating the AI at each step to make the AI output more correct, you update the image that it is trying to classify, to make the AI output more incorrect.
The authors of the paper you referred to applied a similar idea to a Go AI, instead of an image classifier. They used AI training techniques to train an AI that would defeat KataGo, and nothing else. If it did not find this way to trick KataGo, it would find some other way to trick KataGo.
Just like some adversarial images look random but are actually quite specific, it's likely that their AI is placing random-looking stones in very particular places at very particular times in order to trick KataGo into playing more poorly, and you wouldn't get good results by randomly playing stones in this section of the board.

"Adversarial" inputs can sometimes arise without deliberate malicious intent.  I recall a seeing a video of a self-driving car that was completely flumoxed by a road services vehicle that was carrying a bunch of traffic signals for installation.  The person who put the traffic signals in the truck wasn't trying to flummox self-driving cars, but thought it would be obvious that the signals in the back of the truck weren't active.  The AI, however, had no notion that signals might appear in such circumstances.

@supercat Back in the late 90s, the professor teaching intro-to-neural-networks at CSU Chico (she also taught logic-programming classes, the other AI flavor) brought up an example of an AI having been trained on examples of US and Russian tanks having instead learned to distinguish between arial photos taken under ideal circumstances (the "friendly" tanks' training data was all taken under clear skies from optimal angles &c) and those taken under suboptimal circumstances. I'm not so sure I would call every place where an AI takes the wrong lesson from its training data adversarial, though.

I don't agree that it would have found some other way to beat KataGo. They should fix this trivial bug in KataGo, and run their adversarial strategy again. If it actually can win a game, that would be an impressive result.

It does not “trick KataGo into playing more poorly”, unless you including deciding when to pass in “playing”. KataGo set up a won position but stopped playing too soon.

In the Tromp–Taylor rules, the concept of dead stones is left out—all stones on the board at the end of the game are treated as being alive. The KataGo AI was trained primarily using the Tromp–Taylor rules (see the KataGo paper, p. 10). Therefore, the KataGo AI should have captured all of the enemy stones in its territory; the fact that it didn't do so is a failure of the AI.
As you note, one hypothesis is that, in some sense, the KataGo AI thought that it was playing under rules where it didn't need to capture dead stones. However, from reading the adversary paper, I don't see any evidence that the AI was given false information about the rules that it was playing under. If the AI had been given false information, that would have been an enormous blunder on the part of the authors of that paper. Since there's no evidence that the authors made this serious mistake, my belief is that they did not.
You also make the hypothesis that KataGo has a bug in its game-end territory counting algorithm. I don't think that the KataGo AI (the part that decides what move to make, and whether or not to pass) has a game-end territory counting algorithm, so that explanation is impossible.
Furthermore, as you point out, under the standard rules for Go, passing would have been a win for White here. Under the Tromp–Taylor rules, however, it's a loss.
Someone might argue that the Tromp–Taylor rules are flawed, or that they're not really Go, and I don't have any desire to argue against such statements. What seems true, though, is that the adversarial AI successfully beats the KataGo AI at the game that the AI is designed to play.

@Kevin That doesn't make a difference. For the example game that's pictured in the question, neither player has any pass-alive territory at all, so KataGo should have played on.

@Kevin: see https://senseis.xmp.net/?PassAlive : pass-alive means “cannot be captured even if the owner makers no further move”, so Tanner is right.

"However, from reading the adversary paper, I don't see any evidence that the AI was given false information about the rules that it was playing under." - AIs don't know what rulesets are. They only know their own evaluation of the position; and as far as I know, KataGo simply can't be configured to evaluate the position in a way compatible with Tromp-Taylor - as this ruleset practically requires capturing stones that it has been (correctly, for its normal application) trained to consider irrelevant.

I think you're right - this isn't much of a weakness in KataGo.  It looks like there's a mismatch between the way KataGo plays, and the scoring method they're using.  In Tromp-Taylor scoring, White doesn't get any points because there are black stones in White's territory, but KataGo doesn't play this way - it knows none of those stones can live, so it passes.  This would be trivial to fix - make KataGo keep playing until the stones are captured.

Hm. But per the screenshot above, it apparently doesn't know the stones are dead during scoring. Because then it would remove them and give a huge win for white. It looks like there is a disconnect on detection of dead opponent stones during the game (where KataGo seems to understand the situation and doesn't invest moves in capturing dead stones) and after the game. I'd call this a bug, but I don't think the solution would be to have KataGo play on to capture all these stones. The solution should be to correctly detect and treat dead stones at scoring.

Since the setup for this experiment involves one AI (KataGo) playing against a different AI (the one created by the experimenters), it seems likely that the scoring is not being done by KataGo itself, but by another system that is separate from both of those. Unless I'm missing something, I don't see any indication that the scores there are produced by KataGo itself.

Then again, under Japanese rules, playing until the stones are captured would lose points... (assuming the other player keeps passing in the meanwhile). Instead, there's that separate step of verifying whether some set of stones is dead or not. All of which just goes to show that it's just an issue of a mismatch between the rules the AI thinks it's playing under, and the rules actually used by the system to determine the result.

Do you have any additional evidence that "KataGo doesn't play this way"? The original paper about KataGo states that it was trained using Tromp–Taylor scoring.

You can see that KataGo doesn't play this way, because under Tromp-Taylor scoring, KataGo has zero points.

@TimK That only proves that under Tromp-Taylor scoring it was playing badly.  This seems a weak piece of evidence when weighted against the fact that the KataGo team specifies that it is trained under Tromp-Taylor.

Of course, anyone with knowledge of Go will think the Black loses a lot in the game shown.
However, the Tromp-Taylor rules are reasonable rules for Go, which is translation of Chinese rule "stones and empty are both territory". Of course, in Chinese rules, the dead stones should be removed before counting points, however, it is just for convenience. On the one hand, the Go game can be ended naturally when both sides are unwilling to play stone on board, though it seems like a waste of time. On the other hand, the conception dead stone is not clear though it is clear to players at most time, therefore Chinese rules preserve dispute resolution through combat.
In fact, in the older rules of Go, the outcome of game only depends on the stones, which is more troublesome than Tromp-Taylor rules because it means players need to fill stones in his own empty. Of course, in actual operation, it evolved into tax rule that is every living group need to deduct two points because all empty can be filled except for two eyes or the group will die. The Japanese rule "seki has no territory" is also from this rule because neither the shared liberty nor eyes can be filled.
Back to the paper, The katago AI is trained accroding to the Tromp-Taylor rules, so I think it is a victory from the perspective of adversarial attack, but this kind of victory is meaningless from perspective of Go.


text:
In MTG I have a Fear card
How can I find out what type of expansion my fear card is from since it's either Summer Edge or Alpha. Anyway's for me to find out from what expansion it is from?

You can look at the art (and border) on gatherer to narrow it down

If you add a photo of the card then the clever folk here will be able to help you a lot better :-)

I overlayed it with another normal card and yup. Its a limited edition alpha :D

The wording makes me think Alpha or Beta, since the third edition has the updated text on it

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

sort: votes


text:
I have game Catan 3061 and want to buy an extension, are extensions 3066 and 3078 the same?
https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/344333090392539/?ref=search&referral_code=marketplace_search&referral_story_type=post&tracking=browse_serp%3Add6711d2-6b1a-4fe2-bd24-1828b21608e8
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07B8WZJGX/ref=ox_sc_saved_image_3?smid=&psc=1
I have game 3061 and want to buy an extension, are extensions 3066 and 3078 the same?

Catan game 3061

Catan 3061 is typically referred to as 4th Edition, and while Catan: Cities and Knights 3066 is officially called 2nd Edition, it is designed to work with Catan 3061.
While C&K 3078 has been updated for Catan 5th Edition it will work with 3061, but the art will be different from your base game.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Parcheesi: Doubles bonus
We are playing Milton Bradley “Parcheesi” and have an ambiguity in the rules to settle.

DOUBLETS
A roll of matching dice is called
doublets.

• If you roll doublets before all of your
pawns are entered, take your turn
as usual, then roll again.

• Doublets Bonus: If you roll doublets
after all four of your pawns are
entered, use the four numbers on the
tops and the bottoms of the dice for
movement. The total of this four-part
move is always 14, and can be taken
by one pawn or split among 2 or
more pawns.

Ok, so if you get all four of your pawns out, have you triggered the Doublets Bonus for the rest of the game?
Or, if you get pawns sent back to the nest, are they no longer considered “entered” and your bonus is shut-down until the pawns are entered a second time?

Wikipedia says that all the pawns have to be out of the field, but that’s not exactly what the rules say.

FG

I'm going to claim that the phrasing "are entered" refers to the state of the four pieces, not an event (in which case it could have been phrased "If you roll doublets before all four of the pieces have been entered").
Thus, if a piece is sent home, it is no longer the case that all four of the pieces are entered, and you lose the doublet bonus until such time as all four pieces are again entered.
Note that a piece reaching home is not "unentered", so the distinction is between pieces in the nest and pieces out of the nest, not pieces in play  and pieces not in play.

Your answer could be improved with additional supporting information. Please [edit] to add further details, such as citations or documentation, so that others can confirm that your answer is correct. You can find more information on how to write good answers in the help center.


text:
Multiple Yahtzee bonus checkmark rules: additional turn or fill blank box?
Yahtzee cards have rules for multiple 5 of a kind Yahtzees:

✔ FOR EACH BONUS
SCORE 100 PER ✔

Imagine I've already rolled and marked 50 for my first Yahtzee. On my next turn I roll another Yahtzee.
Do I mark a normal scoring box, in addition to the ✔? Can I mark this Yahtzee as a 100 point bonus and fill in a slot for the upper corresponding number, 3 of a Kind, 4 of a Kind, or Chance?
If those boxes are already filled, am I forced to mark 0 for one of the few remaining empty boxes? A Yahtzee would seemingly score 0 for Small Straight, Large Straight, Full House, and 5 of the 6 upper number boxes.
Or do I only mark ✔ for 100 points, then have an additional turn (set of 3 rolls) to fill the scoring box that I didn't use in favor of a ✔ Yahtzee Bonus?
What happens to my turn / boxes if I roll additional Yahtzees?

Do I mark a normal scoring box, in addition to the ✔?

Yes.

Can I mark this Yahtzee as a 100 point bonus and fill in a slot for the upper corresponding number, 3 of a Kind, 4 of a Kind, or Chance?

Yes, with priority given to the upper box. (At least, according to the rules linked below. If your copy of the rules differs, use that, of course.)

If those boxes are already filled, am I forced to mark 0 for one of the few remaining empty boxes?

Yes, if you put it in the upper section.

A Yahtzee would score 0 for Small Straight, Large Straight, Full House, and 5 of the 6 upper number boxes.

You get full normal points for straights and full houses.
From these rules:

If you roll a second Yahtzee in a game, and you scored your first yahtzee in the Yahtzee box, you would score a further bonus 100 points in the yahtzee box. You must also put this roll into another category, as follows;

If the corresponding Upper section category is not filled then you must score there.
ie if you rolled 4 - 4 - 4 - 4 - 4 and the Fours Category is not filled, you must put the score in the Fours category.

If the corresponding Upper section category is filled you may then put the score anywhere on the Upper Section (scoring zero). In 3 of a Kind, 4 of a Kind, and Chance categories you would score the total of the die faces. For the Small Straight, Large Straight, and Full House categories, you would score 30, 40 and 25 points respectively.


text:
How can I play games by myself when I don't have a table?
I often find myself in a bus/train/subway/car without a tray available or any other way of managing even a small play field. There's always games on my phone, but that lacks something compared to an IRL game.
Has anyone found good ways of adapting rulesets for situations like these? Particularly for RPG(ish) games: even  simpler ones seem to require more of a layout and tracking tokens etc than can be managed in situations like this. I'm by myself, but I'm not sure that matters here: anything that could be adapted in a a multiplayer game should be doable in a solo game too.
I'm interested in general techniques people have adapted themselves but I'm also new to the BG scene so I don't really know if this is a (relatively) common thing. If so, it would be useful to know of any "official" rulesets that have adaptations like this to see examples of how game designers themselves make gameplay mechanism X is mapped to table-less mechanism Y, which I could then bring with me to other games.
An example technique would be something like "pen & paper w/ pocket notebook to track token states or die rolls that would normally stay on the table". Or a type of rule that could be dropped out altogether, or dropped & replaced with a simpler mechanism. It would be really useful to have a technique for adapting a play field tiled with cards into keeping them in-hand.
EDIT: I'll leave this open a little longer, I'm not sure how to choose "the" answer though to mark it as such and close it out-- each answer is giving  useful information (so thank you for that). Having the option to mark multiple answers correct when they were correct in different ways would be useful.

There are games that were designed specifically to address this issue.
Here is BGG search for them.
There are few games in this category, but some notable examples include:
Palm Island a light resource management game
Maiden's Quest is somewhat of a light push-your-luck/RPG that plays on a trope of maiden escaping evil captors.
Gloomholdin' is severely downsized version of hit boardgame RPG title Gloomhaven.
Generally I think some solitaire other games that consist mostly of cards can be adjusted for this purpose too, for example Friday, but I haven't tried that myself and amount of work/fiddlyness to do this can get excessive
Also peg solitaire games should work well enough

Thanks-- I've come across some of those and they look interesting, may give them a shot.  Gloomholding looks particularly interesting since it's adapted from Gloomhaven, so if I learn that ruleset I may be able to used examples of how the same mechanics mapped to Gloomholding & use that in other games. It seems the games built specifically for this sort of limited space are a bit niche & uncommon vs. huge numbers of other games. I've been looking at simpler card games I could adapt. I printed a copy of Mage Lite and am working on that now. I think I can work it to play completely in hand.

Solitaire on the bus has an old solution (really, two solutions).
Either standard cards with a play board that has horizontal folded/lapped slots (so a card or stack of cards can be tucked into the folds, often capable of folding up along one or more vertical creases with the tableau still in place), or a magnetic board (using the magnetic sheet material used for things like refrigerator calendars and magnetic cards (usually made of very thin spring steel, not itself magnetized -- so the cards won't stick together -- but attracted to the magnet sheet).
Either of these could be adapted to any game that can be played mainly or completely with cards, and were sold commercially (at least half a century ago when I used to ride Greyhound with some regularity and saw these in use several times).
I couldn't quickly find an image of the kind of boards I saw from time to time back in the early 1970s, but if you picture a Venetian blind, slats running horizontally, with the curve concave up and the lower edges of the slats glued/taped to the base board, you'll be close.  This gives a number of horizontal overlaps, each of which can hold from one to several cards.

"bring my own table" is obvious enough that I'm kicking myself for not thinking of it.  Can you clarify "horizontal folded/lapped slots" though?  Sometimes I'm a little crunched in though, so adaptations that allow playing just in my hands or were a little less obtrusive would be good too. Of course that would probably only work with games that were already not too complex.

I know of various physical (non-phone) solo games that can be played without a table (e.g. Boggle, arguably a board game), but only one which comes vaguely close to being RPG.
Solo chess

You can obtain a magnetic chess set with flat pieces that packs into a small box.

The rules are a derivation of the pieces' moves in real chess.

See What is Solo Chess? How do I play?

Or play conventional chess against yourself.


text:
Am I allowed to steal a opponent's build before claiming my own in Cassino?
In the card game Cassino, there are many printed rules about building.  But I've never seen this one and it led to a heated discussion!
Let's say it's my turn, and I begin building in a legal way.   On my opponent's turn, he also starts a build.  On my next turn, am I allowed to steal his build before I complete my own?  The rules I have found only state that I must hold the card to claim my own build.  I can't find any rule that specifies when I am required to bring my original build home.
So... is it illegal to capture an opponent's build before claiming my own, and if so where is it stated?


text:
Identification: moving and stacking black and white pieces, packed in a tube
My parents had this game, all I can remember:

It was stored in a brownish cardboard tube, about 10 cm in diameter and 50 cm long.
It consists of a playing mat (might have been artificial leather) and cylindrical wooden pieces of about 3 cm diameter, 1,5 cm height.
There were black and white wooden pieces for the two players, maybe some more of a third color.
The pieces were moved across the board and the game was about stacking them, using your own and the opponent's pieces.
Probably from the late seventies, early eighties.
Germany
quite unsure: winning had something to do with tower heights, maybe points were awarded depending on the level that the pieces were on.

do you recall the win condition(s)?

very unsure, but i guess it was about tower heights. see edit

What does the playing mat look like? The description sounds like checkers. Could you highlight the differences and similarities between that game and checkers?

Agree, very generic :) Could also be backgammon if the stacking was not 3d.  Were there dice involved?

Any of these match?
BGG geeklist of games in tubes
Also from the description sounds a lot like DVONN, but it didn't use tube packaging

"A brownish carboard tube" without identifiaction suggests a home made container for the game.

Perhaps Polarity?

black and white (and one red) discs stored in tube
played on (in my version) a canvas mat
points scored by towers that stacked, and the pieces moved across the board because they were magnetic and attracted/repelled each other

The key extras would be:

discs were magnetic
A play was to "lean" a disc against the magnetic field of another leaner or single, or a tower (created by leaners being "caught")
if you caused anything to snap or fall, your turn ends (and if you created or added to a tower, it is flipped to the opponent's colour)

Looks extremely interesting, but no. The pieces were made of wood, I added this to the description.


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Blood On The Clocktower - Mayor / Travelers
Trouble Brewing Almanac:
Travelers count toward the three living players for a Mayor win.
So why do living Travelers need to be exiled before the final day with a living Mayor? This is what the almanac says, but I don't know why. I don't understand the difference between 3 normal characters and 2 normal / 1 traveler, on the final day. Yes, the Traveler means that the demon is one of the other two, changing the odds to 50% for the good players to win by execution, but the Mayor win seems to be unchanged.

Good can't win in that scenario, because Evil has already won.  With only two non-Traveler players alive, Evil wins because Travelers (who cannot be the Demon) don't count against Evil's win condition, per the rulebook:

Travelers do not count toward the evil team winning when
just two players remain alive. For example, if five players
are still alive, but three of them are Travelers, then evil wins.

So if Good wants to attempt a Mayor win, they'll need to exile the living Travelers at "final three" before refusing to execute.

That excerpt makes it clear, thanks. I may have downloaded an earlier version of the almanac. I'm waiting for my copy of BOTC to be shipped to the retailer.

@Bafs that excerpt is from the main rulebook, not the script-specific almanac :) hope you enjoy the game when it arrives.


text:
To what extent is it possible to mimic absentmindedness in competitive, two-player game design?
Absentmindedness occurs in a game when a player has imperfect recall of which game state in a playthrough is current.  For example, in the Absent Minded Driver Problem, a driver values turning at the first of two consecutive intersections the same as receiving $0, turning at the second the same as $4, and driving straight through both the same as $1, but (knowingly) will not recall whether an intersection has already been passed when deciding whether to turn (extending this to many consecutive intersections makes it more realistic).  Absentmindedness produces at least two unintuitive strategic ideas, which may be interesting to try to instantiate in a concrete game (driver-themed example is continued below but need not be in the concrete game).

Since the driver will not recall whether the game is in the first intersection state or the second intersection state, the decision to turn or drive straight cannot differ as a function of this information.  The central paradox of absentmindedness is that evaluated before playing, maximizing expected value seems to warrant driving straight, because planning to turn at both intersections is worth $0 (which is less than $1), but evaluated at an unknown intersection, maximizing expected value seems to warrant abandoning the prior "drive straight" strategy and turning, because turning without any information to disambiguate between the two intersections is worth an average of $2 (which is greater than $1). Hence concrete game design may be able to place a player in a game state in which there appear to be two competing notions of maximizing the expected value of a game action.

Depending on the details of the model (as explicated in the above paper), a player who knowingly will not be able to recall the identity of the current intersection but can change and recall strategies may be incentivized to use strategy as a tool to encode information in a form available to their future self.  Hence concrete game design may be able to incentivize a player at the (metaphorical) first intersection to make trade-offs in their strategy between striving for backward induction (making the "optimal play" given perfect recall) and implicitly communicating some of the information which will be forgotten to their future self.

The challenge is that no one has invented a magic wand to make players forget things (or recall them after the decision is made if necessary to progress the game), so I have to try to mimic one.  I'll exclude some relatively obvious approaches.  If a concrete game is more about roleplaying than competing, then the players could just pretend to forget information.  If there are teams of players and communication between players on a team is limited, then the team personified can be induced to "forget" information by switching the individual decision maker.  Let's instead assume we're making a competitive, two-player game, perhaps a Trading Card Game.
One watered down approach could involve removing, and instead automatically applying, an extremely simple decision.  For example, if a player is instructed to decide how many points to give themselves, and more points is always better but the number declared is only attained if it satisfies some constraints involving public information from past game states, then the game could simply decide the optimal number a player suffering absentmindedness would choose, and the formula could take the player's strategy into account so that the player is incentivized to manage its encoding power.
Another sort of watered down option could be to throw so many similar events at a player in succession that they are actually prone to absentmindedness, but maybe counting isn't so (consistently) hard, and at any rate, this option is problematic because if the player actually forgets the current game state, then there will be no way to agree on it after the decision is made in order to progress the game.
Are there any more clever concrete game design tricks which can be used to mimic or get closer to the above strategic elements of the phenomenon of absentmindedness?

"there will be no way to agree on it after the decision is made in order to progress the game." What do you mean? Why does the player's ability to remember the game state matter for the game to progress? Isn't one feature of card and board games that the game state is represented by the various components?

@TheChaz2.0 I think not.  Most card and board games have both visibly and invisibly represented information.  For example, in Monopoly, there is no component used to represent how many turns someone has been in Jail, and in Magic, there is no component used to represent which phase/step the game state is in currently.  My point was that if a rule or effect said something like "Do X 100 steps from now" with note-taking illegal and the designer banking on the player losing track of the count in order to induce absentmindedness in a player's decision, then immediately after that decision

(if not before), there is almost certain to be difficult-to-resolve disagreement over the objective truth of the count and how to proceed with the game as a consequence.

I would suggest three potential approaches to achieve this:

Time constraints.  If players have to make a lot of decisions under a real-time constraint, they will not be able to keep track of them all.  You can do this either through hourglasses or by having the players race.  Egyptian Rat Screw is a game largely built around this.  Players need to make a decision to slap or not based on a quickly updating card stack and are penalized for both hesitating and slapping incorrectly.

Complexity overload. Have more state tracked by the board game than players can reasonably keep in their head.  For example, in Small World, players victory points are "secret"; the points a player gets is public information, and the number of face-down point tiles each player has is public (tiles may be 1, 5, or 10 points, but it's generally too burdensome to keep a running total of the points of each player in your head.  As a result, players have an approximate sense of who is winning but they don't know for sure.  You could leverage a similar mechanic for a number of states tracked by the game that are important for players to evaluate their decision matrix but players only have a fuzzy notion of the true value.

Randomness. If you want to model the exact confused driver problem and those like it, you can.  Have the player declare a strategy (best implemented as choosing one of several options) and then have the outcome of that be based on choosing one of the underlying states at random.  To use your confused driver example, a player could be presented with the payoff model of turning at various intersections, they make a decision about how they will turn, and then they roll a die to find out if they were at the first or the second intersection and collect points based on what their strategy said.

One general caveat: just because a game theory game is interesting to study does not mean it will be fun or interesting to play in a competitive fashion.  Game theory games really rely on players trying to maximize their score, where competitive games usually focus on players trying to outscore each other, and this can change the incentives.  For example, in a repeated prisoner's dilemma, players can do better from an absolute score perspective than always defecting by playing conditionally cooperative strategies like tit-for-tat; however, if you play "repeated prisoner's dilemma the 2 player game" where the goal is just to score higher than your opponent, all of the interesting pieces of this game go away and always defect becomes the dominant strategy.  In order to actually play a repeated prisoner's dilemma in a way that is fun, you need to embed it in a broader game (such as Diplomacy, which has a repeated prisoner's dilemma players' alliances that emerges out of the game rules and incentives).

I appreciate the point about game theory VS concrete games, and I consider this question highly exploratory, a matter of trying to understand how well the ideas behind absentmindedness can be ported rather than presuming.  I think the particular repeated prisoner's dilemma example is only problematic because it works by manipulating both players' payoffs, and in zero sum contexts all payoff gains for one player are equal losses for the other, whereas absentmindedness only needs to manipulate one player's payoffs.

I don't think the randomness idea preserves the strategic structure of the driver problem, because the expected values before playing would become the same as the expected values while playing (the driver problem arises because the strategy at the average of the intersections is a bad strategy at the first intersection).  Also, there would be no possibility of the driver at the first intersection encoding information for their future self.  The Small World example might end up going somewhere I'll think about it some more.

Possible Issues
The common ground for each game probably will be that understanding the game state is a good thing, so answering this question would in my opinion have to be tied to a specific intent. You need a good reason to introduce any such mechanic in order to avoid just making the game in question deliberately worse than it could be.
This reason, in turn, is important to answer the question. I'll loosely lean on @Zags' answer's approaches (which I very much agree with by the way) to illustrate my reasoning:

If your goal is to prevent analysis paralysis, you choose time constraints as a factor. For example, you tell the player that the 42nd intersection is the last one while quickly turning up tiles so that they will have no chance of counting intersections perfectly and will have to guess to a point. You likely gain speed and interactivity between players, but will get a game that will probably be received as a party game rather than a competitive one.
If your goal is to facilitate educated guesses, you choose secrecy as a factor. For example, each player holds cards that show a number of intersections, and from the amount of players, cards in their hands, and cards in your own hand, you can infer what the optimal intersection to choose might be. You gain a factor of engagement and rewarding knowledge of the game's mechanics, but you put newer players at a disadvantage in general while still allowing for sheer luck to decide games, rather than skill.
If your goal is to achieve unpredictability or gamling, you choose randomness as a factor. For example, draw cards from a deck to determine whether you hit another intersection or overplayed your hand. You likely gain positive uncertainty, but lose man aspects of skill, which in turn might not make the overall result very competitive in nature.

What all those reasons have in common is that they don't seem to benefit the overall goal of creating a competitive game, which at least from my understanding should reward skilled gameplay and reduce random or arbitrary outcomes to a minimum.
Possible Solutions
This raises the question whether there is a way to introduce the wanted amount of uncertainty without sacrificing those factors, effectively extending @Zags' list, which is why I'll stick to the same formatting:

Player-decided game state changes. We already hypothesized both that randomness can be a solution to the problem, as well as that there are issues with this approach. However, there is another way to achieve unpredictability, which is player actions. If both players have to react to each others' actions, each player will have to interact with a game state they cannot predict, effectively resulting in the same qualities as randomness, however will be much more compatible with competitive scenarios, as you are able to affect the new game state your opponent has to deal with, regardless of what their plans might have been. Examples that come to mind are The Matchstick Game and Connect Four, but really, this sort of interaction is very common in games.
Deciding on the objective after the action. One way of not just simulating but creating actual unawareness of the exact objective is if it isn't defined at the time you have to take your actions. This can be done as in Betrayal at House on the Hill where neither the role of the traitor nor the game's objective can be known in the first half of the game, or also in Cards Against Humanity, where you get points based on votes and therefore knowledge of the people at your table rather than a correct strategic decision with a peg on a board, but most importantly because of the tone set by the other cards played in this or previous rounds, making individual cards' values different in each game.
Rewarding intentional blind actions. The last take I can think of is offering the player to forego information in exchange for a certain reward, such as ingame currency. This in general introduces meaningful choice, but more importantly for the topic at hand, also encourages players to stay oblivious in exchange for more benefit in the remainder of the game. I can't come up with any exact example for this, but Sheriff of Nottingham does something similar enough perhaps.

For completeness' sake, I'll also mention the category of games that threaten absentmindedness, but do not enforce it, and instead reward you for overcoming it. What comes to mind are Simultaneous Exhibition games, as most commonly seen for Chess. While this borders on being similar enough to the complexity overload category, I believe the difference is that the player isn't meant to be drowned in a sea of information, but rather, the rules, game state, and strategy all are as "simple" as any regular game of Chess, but the player faces the challenge of testing their skill in a more complex way where you cannot hope to succeed if you lose track of even a single one of the played boards.

A fourth option is to explicitly pre-commit actions before knowing the circumstances those actions will be taken in. For example, in Killer Bunnies, players place some actions into a queue on their turn, and those actions trigger when they exit the queue on a future turn - but in the meantime, other actions have modified the game state in unexpected ways. (I believe Robo Rally does this as a central mechanic, and probably better than Killer Bunnies does, and I'd like to recommend it as an example but I haven't played it myself)

I have edited the question to make it more clear that that features of absentmindedness I originally highlighted in explaining the concept actually are the features which it is my intent to instantiate in a concrete game.

Make the player take meticulous, detailed, notes; or simulate the same by for example dropping items as markers. For instance, this now well-known game situation.

Of course, the player in this game quickly realizes that the Thief is acquiring all dropped items, necessitating an alternative strategy for maneuvering out of the "All Different" maze. Further along, the player encounters the "All Alike" maze:

If you require a player to be absentminded - then create a situation where the player's absent-mindedness is a natural consequence of the circumstances.


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Are there strategies to counter politics, as defined by Richard Garfield?
In Characteristics of Games by Richard Garfield et al., a dynamic which emerges within a large number of multisided games is explicated...

Imagine a game, which we’ll call the “chip-taking game,” where each
player starts with a pile of ten chips. Players take turns going
around the table. On her turn, a player may take one chip from any
player and discard it. The winner is the last person with any chips
left. Most people would not enjoy playing this game for long. There is
no real skill involved, other than the skill of convincing other
people not to take your chips. And even if you possess that skill,
once the other players notice you have it, they will probably react by
trying to eliminate you first.
Unfortunately, many multiplayer games reduce to the chip-taking game,
in the sense that most of their game features are irrelevant for
determining the winner, who is instead chosen ultimately in
chip-taking fashion. All that’s necessary is that the game be highly
interactive, in the sense that players can affect the positions of
other players, and also that players can target whoever they affect.
Players can simply choose to hurt (“take chips from”) the leader using
whatever means the game offers. Even if the leader is highly skilled,
he is unlikely to be able to withstand the onslaught of all the other
players. Once the leader is eliminated, or at least knocked back from
his leading position, the players can attack some new player.
As a simple albeit artificial example, suppose we modify the
chip-taking game so that on a player’s turn, she chooses another player
and plays a game of chess against him; if she wins he discards two
chips, and if she loses he discards only one. This game has all the
complexity and skill of chess, but it doesn’t matter. Kasparov is no
more likely to win than anyone else at this game, and probably less;
the other players are likely to choose him consistently until he’s
eliminated.
...
When players can target other players in an arbitrary way that
differentially affects their game states, we refer to this as politics.

Although the above language has a definitive tone, it seems that in some cases, even meeting the aforesaid criteria and even when the ranking of player skill is common knowledge, it could be possible for the most skilled player to avoid suffering politics by manipulating how the probabilities of each opponent winning evolve as players are removed from contention.  For example, in a three player game of Magic in which it is common knowledge that Player A is the most skilled followed by Player B and finally Player C, there could in principle be some strategy for Player A such that either or both of Player B and Player C would be punished by aggressing against Player A before one of the other players gets eliminated.
My first thought was some kind of defensive "barrier" strategy, an extreme example being gaining quasi-infinite life.  Another was a sort of "landmine" strategy, such as combat tricks which make attacking Player A very dangerous.  However, these should only be effective (against game theoretically rational opponents) if Player B and Player C care about who gets second place.  If their only goal is to maximize their individual probabilities of getting first place, then even though the barrier or landmine would make Player A the hardest or most dangerous player to aggress against, there is not necessarily any incentive to aggress against easier or less dangerous players first; the barrier or landmine will have to be conquered to get first place either way.
(The dynamics appear to get qualitatively more complex by adding a fourth player, i.e., if Player C and Player D aggress against Player A, it may be rational for Player B to aid Player A, preferring to face Player A rather than both Player C and Player D together, since Player B would in the latter case become the next victim of politics.)
Are there any real deck/gameplay strategies in games such as multiplayer Magic which overpower politics?

I'll focus on the explicit definition of politics in that quotation:

When players can target other players in an arbitrary way that differentially affects their game states, we refer to this as politics.

One option for countering this is to is to constrain players' abilities to target other players. For example, the card Pramikon, Sky Rampart has the abilities:

As Pramikon, Sky Rampart enters the battlefield, choose left or right.
Each player may attack only the nearest opponent in the chosen direction and planeswalkers controlled by that opponent.

Attacking is one of the primary methods players have for targeting each other to try to make them lose. This card and cards like it let you control that aspect of the flow of the entire game.
More generally, you can play cards that take away other players' options for targeting you specifically. This can include cards like Blazing Archon to prevent anyone from attacking you, Leyline of Sanctity to prevent them from targeting you in the sense that the MTG rules mean it, Avacyn, Angel of Hope to prevent them from destroying any of your permanents, etc.
Even more generally, any card that lets you disrupt other players' targeting of you or each other can be a counter to politics. This can include counterspells, removal, and other things.

This is a great approach I didn't consider; instead of incentivizing players not to target you, just make it impossible.  I still wonder if there's an approach in terms of incentives.  Maybe I'll try to work out the necessary and sufficient conditions in more formal terms and ask a more specific question.

In Magic there are several ways a powerful player can overcome politics, in large part because a player can choose their deck.  This makes most sense to analyze in the case of repeat play among a stable playgroup.  Here are three ways to do it:

Play a deck that is opponent-count agnostic such as combo.  You need to play combos that go "infinite" (such as Exquisite Blood + Vito, Thorn of Dusk Rose) rather than combos that get you to 20 damage very efficiently (such as Channel + Fireball).  Here, the skill is in piloting your deck, dodging two player's worth of removal, and setting off your combo before the aggro of two players can kill you.

Play a defensive flavor of control.  This involves cards that that make it obnoxious for people to attack you, like Ghostly Prison, Lightmine Field, and Hold the Line.  So long as you are not overtly offensively threatening, you can change the calculus for other players attacking you such that it isn't worth it.  Your goal here is likely to get the game to go to a standoff that your deck has some way to win (such as a combo or milling opponents).

Play a deck that is worse.  Reducing your threat, so long as you can publicly signal that you are doing so, will make two other rational players fight each other first.  This has solid game theory foundations.  See the Ted Ed Wizard Standoff for a game theoretical example.

Play a deck that leans into politics.  There are many cards like Bazaar Trader, Phelddagrif, Zedruu the Greathearted, or even Howling Mine that can let you manipulate the state of the table to change people's priorities.  As much as you may be the biggest threat in the abstract, if you can change it so someone else is the biggest threat in the concrete, that can change the focus of player's ire.  Credit to @TimC for this point.

I'd add one more (but I don't feel like it should be its own answer) which is to increase the threat posed by other players. A card that causes other players to draw cards durably increases the threat of aggro and combo decks. If I play a Howling Mine, eliminating me won't make the combo player un-draw their cards, so unless they can kill me before anyone else draws too many extra cards, savvy players would target the combo player first instead of me.

Diplomacy, I'm told, is the ultimate game of politics that isn't the Great Game (which I don't think is on-topic here).  Even "politicsless" (can't talk to other players) variants, the goal is to get your ideas across to your potential allies through your plays such that you have "agreed" on a strategy.  Diplomacy is also a long-standing, very healthy game for half a century or more.  I'm not very good at it for some reason...
All this to say that politics in games, Garfield's analogy aside, is not necessarily a bad thing, or a thing to try to minimize.  This is despite all the questions on this site on "how to stop kingmaking" (aka I've taken you out of contention for winning, how dare you use your remaining power in the game for revenge?), "how to create games where 'gang up on the leader' is not a go-to strategy" (because we know we can't beat the table, but we don't know how to beat the table, just the game), and all the rest.
The winner of a game should be the person who played the game best under the restrictions and freedoms provided by the game.  In a game that "suffers from" politics, "politics" is part of the skills required to play the game best and win.  As far as I can see, multiplayer M:tG "suffers from" politics in almost all of its incarnations, to the frustration of Spikes who don't consider "politics" a skill.
As others are saying, there are ways to mitigate, but not remove, politics from any multi-contestant game (removing from consideration games where there are >2 players, but only 2 "sides", like Bridge or Princess Ryan's Space Marines).  And certainly, that is one of the reasons that "pure skill" players that want the winner to be "the person that showed the most skill that game/day" don't like multiplayer.  Especially if they aren't the most skillful in politics.
But, there's even politics in 2-player games, at least at the non-professional level.  Consider constructed FNM, or the local club duplicate.  If skill is too heavily favoured, it becomes a game of "show up, pay our entry fee, K wins again (or maybe Y, once a month); we're Dead Money; why don't we spend our money at the movies tonight instead?" (or "why don't we invite a few of our fellow dead money over for Commander, or play Fluxx?")  Now, maybe that "game" is more for the LGS/club management than the players at the table, but even K and Y end up losing if the game dies.  So even there, it behooves the "skill should prevail" people to find some way for others to win sometimes, even if it's not showing up one week, or playing a tier 2 deck and trying to win anyway, or agreeing to mentoring games or bracketed events being held.

I think the last paragraph constructs an unrealistically nihilistic model of a new player's capacity for human thought.  Many are not purely myopic reflections of their past win rate, but also process factors like how fun the game play seems it will be when they have more experience, whether it feels like their heuristics are improving over time, how satisfying each win and each loss in a game are, etc.

Folks in a fixed mindset will be more focused on the immediate gratification, while those who adopt a growth mindset will tend to look past.  Surely a world in which players self-select among games well-suited to a wide variety of time preferences is better than a world in which all development is constrained to fight over the most myopic possible caricature of a person?

The choice of letters K and Y for anonymous players comes across as somehow personal....

It was in fact actually random...But yes, I might have come up with a better combination.  I feel Alice and Bob (or Angel y Bari) get a bad deal.

@user10478 I have, to my despair, 30 years of experience with this.  I'm not talking the "new players"; they're fine.  It's the "life novices" or "life Cs" that are the issue.  They frankly are the bread and butter of the world - they're as good as they're going to get, but they still enjoy the game, so they show up every week to play.  They don't enjoy knowing that if they do well, they'll eventually have to play "the every week winner" again (or even any of the strong players) and get slaughtered, again.   But eventually even they get tired of it and go online, or go back into the kitchen.

And I'm not saying all the time.  I very carefully said "sometimes".  I added "mentoring/training" as options for the "always winners" at the club/LGS to bring up the life 2-3s to a level where it's a competition again.  I assume the "always winners" play up when they can and get beat up by the Regional sharks; if they don't (and some really like winning more than competing), that's also a political issue (for the LGS/club, at least).  Same with the people who work hard to ensure that the events to be played are the ones they're better at.

If "strategies" for playing a game that ameliorate the "politics" problem Garfield is talking about exist, then the game only partially suffers from the "politics" problem.  And indeed, there are multiple game-design techniques to mitigate against "politics", one of which is allowing for strategies that make politics less important.  It is not a binary thing -- any given game is not either no politics or all politics.
Garfield basically claims that limiting the ability to target specific players is the easist way to achieve this in any game, but it is not the only way.
Allowing defensive strategies can help, but mostly only for non winner-take-all games (there needs to be a benefit to coming in second).  Otherwise it can maybe obscure the politics, but they still crop up.
Another possibility is to give a benefit from eliminating a player, in which case the game often becomes a contest to identify and eliminate the weak(est) players first.  Politics can still come into play here, but it is much less stable.
Even if you just think about limiting attack possibilities, the trivial "only attack the player on your left/right" is not the only way -- you can have windows that open and close for attacking specific players.


text:
Where can I see statistics of Go points for different skill levels?
I'm a total Go novice, and barely even understand the rules. From what I understand, at the end of the game each player has an amount of "points" which is equal to the amount of stones they captured (or something like that). The player with most points wins.
If two players with the same Elo play against each other, it should be that the expected difference in their amount of points is 0. Yet Go also has a handicap system, where someone with Elo 3500 can play against 4000 and to compensate starts with a set of initial points.
My question is: What are the statistics on how many handicap points one needs to give a player of rank X in order to still have even winning chances against one of rank Y?
For example, it might be that for a 4000 Elo player to have even odds against a 3000 one, they need a handicap of 8 stones (random guess). I'm interested in what these numbers are for the whole range of Elo.
Note:

I'm not sure if this is actually equal to "the amount of handicap points actually given based on different ranks", because they might not adjust the latter to match the former.

It probably also isn't equal to "the amount of excess points actually obtained in games without handicap", because maybe the better player achieves fewer excess points than they could, by taking risk-averse strategies.

There was a paper describing exactly what you're asking, but I can't find it immediately. The gist of it was that it depends on a) the Elo-like pattern in use - the win rate between players 100 points apart varies from 1:1.5 to 1:4 or so - and b) the strength - at high levels, a single stone of handicap is worth more than 100 Elo points, at low levels a handicap stone may be worth only a fraction of that.

Check out Sensei’s , Library and you will find a lot of information on this and many other useful topics in Go.

If you are playing against a skilled player, they'll be able to explain it to you.  If instead, like many beginners, you are playing against other beginners, you'll quickly work out your own relative handicaps based on past games.  (E.g. whenever you beat someone three times in a row, you increase the handicap by 1 (and reset the count to zero), where the handicap is the number of stones they can play on their first move.) This handicap system works far better with Go than with many other games (e.g. chess), and allows skilled players to play challenging games against beginners.

My answer gave a source, but not much detail; I have extended it to address more of your questions.

Clarifications
Before answering, I would like to clarify some things;

Your score is not how many stones you have captured¹, but how much of the board you control. This means areas where your opponent cannot play without being captured. Details: Scoring
A stronger player does not generally give a weaker player a handicap of so many points of score (though that is possible), but rather gives them free moves for the difference in their ranks.
Details: Handicap
In most events, only a win or loss matters, so players do not try to maximise their score: if they seem clearly behind, they may risk losing a lot more even for a small chance to win; if this fails they are likely to resign. This means that statistics about winning margins in points (which are often not recorded) would not allow reliable conclusions.

European statistics
Source
There are different ranking systems in different countries and on different Go servers, as described at Rating Systems.
In particular, the European Go Database (EGD) operates an ELO system, and provides statistics here on win probability against rank difference and handicap given.
Examples
For example, if I select the period 2015-01-01 – 2022-06-22, it churns for quite a while (perhaps 20 seconds), and then shows several tables of statistics. There one can see, for example, that in games between players 2 ranks apart with 2 stones handicap (i.e. the standard handicap), Black (the weaker player) won 39% of the time (34% for kyu – weaker – players, and 39% for dan – stronger – players). For a 5 rank difference Black won 35% (in all cases) with 5 stones but only 16% with 1 stone (17% for kyu players, 7% for dan players).
Conclusions
I have not studied the statistics in detail, but one thing that stands out is that the standard handicap (1 stone per rank) only gives Black about a 35% chance of winning in most cases, except for a difference of 1 rank, where it is about 45%. Further, to answer your bolded question, it looks as though the weaker player needs 1 or 2 stones more than the rank difference for an even chance, but such a handicap is almost never given, so that is an extrapolation.
(You actually seems to be asking about the points needed to make a game even, but the score difference is often not recorded, and I think that these (EGD) statistics do not allow a conclusion about this. Also the approach I mentioned of playing for a win rather than to minimise your loss would confuse the issue further.)
Secondly, weaker players get better results than stronger against opponents a given number of ranks stronger (also in games without handicap); perhaps this means that weaker players vary more, or that their ranks are less accurately estimated by the system.
Notes
¹ This (score = captives) may possibly have been the case in the origins of the game, though the situation seems not really clear to me, and is now definitely not the case anywhere I know of. See Ancient Chinese Rules and Philosophy and Prisoner Scoring for some more details.

Your first point isn't strictly true, while Prisoner Scoring isn't commonly used there is some evidence it was used for early Wei-Ch'i games.

@KMR: Interesting, but that article is very short and the discussion makes it sound quite controversial. And in the Ancient Chinese Rules and Philosophy, Bill Spight remarks that “the extant game records indicate that territory was counted, not just captured stones”.


text:
Triggered ability resolution order (603.3b) for multiple players
Suppose my opponent has a Kaervek the Merciless

Whenever an opponent casts a spell, Kaervek the Merciless deals damage equal to that spell's mana value to any target.

and I have a Balefire Liege

Other red creatures you control get +1/+1.
Other white creatures you control get +1/+1.
Whenever you cast a red spell, Balefire Liege deals 3 damage to target player or planeswalker.
Whenever you cast a white spell, you gain 3 life.

It's my turn, I have 1 life left and I try to Sword to Plowshares Kaervek. If I understand the rule correctly, I will first put the Balefire Liege +3 life on the stack, then my opponent will put the 1 damage to any target on the stack. On resolution, Kaervek will deal damage first and I will lose instantly. Rule 603.3b states:

603.3b If multiple abilities have triggered since the last time a player received priority, the abilities are placed on the stack in a two-part process. First, each player, in APNAP order, puts each triggered ability they control with a trigger condition that isn’t another ability triggering on the stack in any order they choose. (See rule 101.4.) Second, each player, in APNAP order, puts all remaining triggered abilities they control on the stack in any order they choose. Then the game once again checks for and performs state-based actions until none are performed, then abilities that triggered during this process go on the stack. This process repeats until no new state-based actions are performed and no abilities trigger. Then the appropriate player gets priority.

It makes no sense to me as the active player will always be at a disadvantage since its triggered abilities will always resolve last.
Is this the correct interpretation of the rules? Would waiting for my opponent's turn to cast the Swords to Plowshares change anything to this?

What is your question?

@murgatroid99 Basically, am I right or wrong

Yes, your interpretation of the rules is correct. And yes, waiting for your opponent's turn to cast the spell would change the outcome because a different player would be the active player, so the triggered abilities would get put on the stack in a different order.
The Active Player, Nonactive Player order rule is used almost everywhere that players need to make choices or take actions in some order. It is described in detail in rule 101.4:

If multiple players would make choices and/or take actions at the same time, the active player (the player whose turn it is) makes any choices required, then the next player in turn order (usually the player seated to the active player’s left) makes any choices required, followed by the remaining nonactive players in turn order. Then the actions happen simultaneously. This rule is often referred to as the “Active Player, Nonactive Player (APNAP) order” rule.

The ordering of triggered abilities is simply one consequence of this ordering rule.


text:
Can running 4 copies of a Magic card with different art have an advantage/disadvantage over cards with identical art?
Can having marks or different art on the front of cards make any difference to gameplay?
(I'm not looking for Un-set abilities like Art Rampage or cards like "Drawn Together".)

To gain/lose advantage by using different arts would have to involve cards moving between hidden zones. Having different art can only increase information.
It seems this gain of information can work in either yours, or your opponents favour. (As my examples show) But the information gain is minimal. I also suspect it's more likely for your opponent to gain additional info, than for you to. This is because it must involve cards moving between two hidden/private zones (or face-down in a public zone) and there are two zones hidden from your opponent (hand and library), and only one hidden from you (library).
Different arts can be a disadvantage
Your opponent Thoughtseizes you, seeing a Forest with art A, among other cards.
Next turn you draw another Forest, art B. Then you destroy your opponent's Black Cat, so you discard a card at random, which happens to be Forest B.
An observant opponent still knows your entire hand, however, had you used the same art, they would not know your most recent draw.
Different arts can be an advantage
Your Triumph of Saint Katherine dies, shuffling it with the top six cards of your library. As you draw your next six cards, there is just one Saint Katherine, but this time in foil.
You now know that the top card is your first Saint Katherine. If they were the same, you wouldn't know.

In the first example, you didn't have to already have 2 different Forests when you were thoughtseized; it works the same if your opponent just saw 1 Forest and then you drew and played a different-art Forest.

You are right, but I plan to update anyway. It can work without a misplay if the new forest is randomly discarded

In the first example, there isn’t really any less convoluted way for your opponent to gain that info, the only other option is to track the ordering of the cards in your hand (which you can make an arbitrarily difficult task without breaking any rules).

@AustinHemmelgarn I was always under the impression that the hand being an unordered private zone wouldn't need to be "trackable". (Except for miracle...) I was meaning that I suspect there are more ways for your opponent to gain an advantage than you to gain any.

Simpler and more common example of a disadvantage from multiple arts: you run unique arts for each of your basic lands, because you want to show off all your cool versions. You cast Cultivate, searching up and revealing two forests, putting one into play and a second into your hand where you already had at least one other forest. Go to combat, play some other spells, then play a forest for turn: do you remember which forest art you searched up and revealed to your opponent? You're sure? If not, you've just revealed extra information about your hand.

@BradC I had a similar example previously, but I didn't want the examples to rely on a misplay.

There is the marginal disadvantage that cards with different arts may leak information about the number of copies of that card that your deck contains. E.g., if your opponent sees one art in game one, and a different art in game two, then they know that your deck contains at least two copies of the card, when otherwise they wouldn't know that.
This is an extremely minor disadvantage and not worth worrying about in most circumstances, but if you're trying to absolutely maximize your advantage in a competitive setting then all else being equal you would generally prefer for all of your copies of a given card to be indistinguishable.

Some players in the old days would play the same art of all there basics. If your opponent saw your hand and saw some lands they could then not deduce that one of your later draws was a land if the basic they saw from the discard spell was the same art as the land you drew.
This made the deck slightly easier to play as you could play either land and not have to worry about playing the land in your opening hand first.
Being able to deduce that one of your opponents cards in hand is a land can influence the do-you-think-they-have-it decision.
This is only marginally useful, but in competitive play these types of min-maxing plays give the fine edges that can be the difference between top 8 and finishing the tournament in 10th place.

It can increase the cognitive load on your opponent. Examples of where it might lead your opponent to making a mistake:
You have two tapped islands with the same art, and a third untapped island with different art. Your opponent forgets about the third island and plays their bomb, only for it to be countered.
You play a bomb in the first game of your match. After the game, you sideboard it out for the same bomb, but different art. In the second game, your opponent plays Bitter Ordeal and doesn't notice the bomb in your deck, and so exiles a different card.
Hopefully it doesn't have to be said that this is bad sportsmanship.


text:
What is the width and height of the "Chance" and "Community Chest" cards in Monopoly?
What is the exact width and height of Monopoly's "Chance" and "Community Chest" cards in inches?
I do not have access to mine (a 1950's set) at the moment, but they seemed to be around 3⅛ (3.125) inches x 2 inches (but may have changed with different editions, etc.).

According to Monopoly Land:

Monopoly Chance and Community Chest cards are 3 1/8 inches tall and 2 inches wide. If you work in centimetres, that’s 8 cm tall and 5 cm wide.

Of course those aren't 100% accurate, as 2 inches = 5.08 centemeters.

"Monopoly Land" has errors, such as: "In Mpnopoly, Chance cards, Community Chest cards and Title Deed cards are all the same size." I'm not referring to their "Mpnopoly" typo, I'm referring to the fact that the Title Deed cards are definitely not the same size as Chance and Community Chest (in my copy or this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuWvMgYv03g ). Additionally, they do not show measurements of Chance / Community Chest card sizes (as they do with properties). I appreciate the answer, but questionable sites like that with no official authority are why I'm asking this question!


text:
Are there any known variants of this tabletop game?
This paper-and-pencil game is said to be published in 1993, although it is known to be played by tech students since early 80's.
Terra Incognita tabletop game is believed to stem from it.
The game is played by at least 1 player and 1 host. First, a map of the world is created by a host, or generated by a computer. The map consists of at least one floor, surrounded by unbreakable (solid, or 'capital') walls everywhere except the entrances. At least one entrance must exist not blocked by any type of wall, and reachable and traversable both from outside and inside of the map. The map consists of square cells, or tiles. There are 6 directions the player can choose to go on his turn. The game is turn-based. He can choose to either go north, south, west, east, up or down. Vertical directions are only available when standing on stairs. The player may also choose to skip his turn. In that case, he either remains in place or teleports further by the 'well' system (see below). There are different types of tiles available, which apply different effects on the player.
The very basic tile is the solid ground, or empty tile. It does nothing and is the safest one. It also contains nothing, except for the cases when players have dropped anything in it, or when a player was killed on it. There are also rivers, river mouths, wells, chasms and bases and stairs.
Rivers move the player two tiles ahead against his will every time he enters it, until he reaches the river mouth. The player may opt to move backwards by the river, but the actual move will not take action. Moving further ahead by the river is allowed and doable. If the player opts to skip his turn while in the river, it counts as first entering it (falling inside) and moves him by 2 more cells along the current. River mouths are tiles which do not move you anymore, but you can only escape the mouth by moving sideways. Climbing out from the mouth along the current is allowed, but will not take action.
Wells are teleports. Entering the well moves you to the next well of that system. There can be multiple well systems on the map. The last well in the system returns you to the first.
Chasms move the player one floor below. There can be another chasm underneath the first one. Therefore, the player cannot know how many floor did he fell through. All chasms must have a "foundation" tile underneath it. One-floor maps do not have any chasms or foundations (also called bases).
Tiles can be divided by walls. There are solid walls, and breakable ones. Walls cannot divide the rivers. A breakable wall turns into a broken one after someone demolishes it. Players do not know where the walls are located until they try to cross them.
Players are allowed to make notes as for the map discovered so far, but are not allowed to share their map fragments. Most rivers, wells and chasms will bring ambiguity as to the player's whereabouts, therefore, he has to make notes and try to discover the correct topology by revisiting it.
The goal of the game is to find the treasure (the only tile on entire map which has this attribute) and escape the labyrinth. When playing with more than 1 player, others will try to locate you and shot you to death, trying to steal the treasure from you.  All players are aware of each other's moves and the host's responses. Therefore, you usually keep notes not only of your moves, but also try deducing the map from other's moves as well.
There are 3 special type of tiles which grant you resources: mine arsenal, ammunition, and medkit. Each player can carry up to 3 mines, 5 bullets, and has 3 health points. Mines are used to demolish breakable walls. Shots may be performed in any of the 4 directions. And health is completely regenerated when standing on medkit.
The game ends when one of the players have successfully reached the exit carrying the treasure with him. The typical map size is 10x10x3, meaning there are 3 floors, 10 by 10 tiles each, plus the entrance tiles which are outside the map area.

Not quite the same thing, but the children game "Magic Labyrinth" presents a labyrinth with hidden walls under the board; each player's pawn has a magnet, and is associated with a metal ball under the board. When a player hits a wall while moving, they lose their metal ball and everyone learns that a wall was there.

Labyrinth was first played in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and like a lot of pen and paper games has a pretty loosely defined rule-set.
Probably the first codified version of the game was published in Yunyi Tekhnik (Young Technician) in 1993's second issue, where it was called "Iskateli kladov" (Treasure Hunters), this version has been simplified for children and only includes a single floor.
The wikipedia page linked in the question actually has a link to another variant in it's External links section, termed Labyrinth for 2 by the author.
Again this variant is designed to be simpler and quicker with only two floors, and no indestructible walls.


text:
Can you 4:1 trade with the bank if you don't own any shoreside settlements?
The question is about the base game. I'm interested in whether any of the expansions affect this rule in any way.
My family recently bought Catan, and we're having a dispute over how the maritime trade rule is supposed to be interpreted. We went through the relevant rule:

b) Maritime Trade
You can also trade without the other players! During your turn, you
can always trade at 4:1 by putting 4 identical resource cards back in
their stack and taking any 1 resource card of your choice for it. If
you have a settlement or city on a harbor Y, you can trade with the
bank more favorably: at either a 3:1 ratio or, in certain harbors, at
2:1 (trading the resource type shown). Important: The 4:1 trade is
always possible, even if you do not have a settlement on a harbor.

The disupute is over the "settlement on a harbor" part. The two interpretations are as follows:

You can 4:1 trade with the bank if you have a settlement on the shore, but it doesn't have to be on one of the harbors.

The reasoning behind this is that the bank is not on the island of Catan, so the trade happens by ship - that's why it's called the maritime trade. You need to have a settlement on the shore so the ship has a place to go to make the exchange of resources.

You can always 4:1 trade with the bank, period. The shoreside settlements are, in this regard, no different from those not on the shore.

The above reasoning is nice, but it's just fluff - the rules-as-written say "always", not "if you have an exit to the sea".
Which interpretation is the correct one?

The quoted rule passage literally says you can always trade at 4:1 by putting 4 identical resource cards back in their stack and taking any 1 resource card of your choice for it, and also Important: The 4:1 trade is always possible.  Seems crystal clear to me!

It does seem crystal clear, but 1/3 of my boardgaming group interpreted it the other way, which is why I felt the need to ask this question.

I've played Catan but I am certainly not an expert, but coming from my yugioh background, "you can" is optional

IOW, your friends think that flavor trumps the plain language of the rules. Since that seems to be the issue, you can give them the argument of "Why does it cost 4:1 no matter which way I trade (e.g. you can trade 4 wood for 1 ore, but you can't trade 1 ore for 4 wood)? Clearly there are very high shipping costs."

In the video game I play, you can always trade 4:1 (if not a more favorable deal) in Settlers of Catan, Seafarers, Cities and Knights, and Cities and Knights with Seafarers.

From the Rules and Almanac download:

MARITIME TRADE
On your turn, you can trade resources using maritime trade during the trade phase even without involving another player.
The most basic (and unfavorable) exchange rate is 4:1. You may trade 4 identical resource cards to the supply in exchange for 1 resource card of your choice. You do not need a harbor Y (settlement at a harbor location) to trade at 4:1, so when nobody wants to trade…
Example: Benny returns 4 ore cards to the supply and takes 1 lumber card in exchange. Normally, he should ﬁrst try a more favorable trade with the other players (domestic trade).
If you have built a settlement or city at a harbor Y location, you can trade more effectively.
[Emphasis mine]

Notice, in the description of the most basic rules and in the example, there is no mention of requiring a settlement or city anywhere.
Think of it this way, if you buy a large TV at a local store. That TV was likley made far away over water. Shipped to a settlement or city on the water and trucked to your settlement or city. The extra expense of moving it over land from a harbor is represented by the additional cost (4⮕1 vs 3⮕1).

Great point about there not being a single mention of settlements, either on the shore or anywhere else! I presented an argument similar to your TV example today and it went over great. Thanks!

Reading rules can be a bit of a learned skill.
The basic principles are, in general:

There is no hidden rules.
Rules often have a generic case and exception cases.

So, decomposing the paragraph given into sentences:

You can also trade without the other players!

More "introduction" than rule.

During your turn, you can always trade at 4:1 by putting 4 identical resource cards back in their stack and taking any 1 resource card of your choice for it.

A rule in itself: 4:1 trade.

If you have a settlement or city on a harbor Y, you can trade with the bank more favorably: at either a 3:1 ratio or, in certain harbors, at 2:1 (trading the resource type shown).

In specific circumstances, you may get a better ratio. This does not affect the more general circumstances.

Important: The 4:1 trade is always possible, even if you do not have a settlement on a harbor.

A precision that the 4:1 does not require a settlement on a harbor -- likely there because "maritime" could otherwise be construed to require a harbor.
What this precision does NOT say is that a settlement is at all required.

Interpretation (b) is correct. You can always trade 4:1 with the bank regardless of where your settlements are placed.

While I do agree (and will most likely continue to play this way), I was hoping for an answer backed up by some official source if possible. I'll leave this open until tomorrow, and if nobody comes along with an authoritative source by then, I'll accept your answer. Thanks.

The rules of a board game are whatever it says in the rulebook. What the rulebook says is that you can always trade at 4:1. Therefore, the rule is that you can always trade at 4:1.
You asked for "an answer backed up by some official source." The rulebook is an official source, so there you have it.
Of course, if they want to, your family can refuse to play according to the rules. They can decide that they don't want to play in a way that's at odds with what seems to make sense. But if they do decide to follow the rules, then the rule is totally unambiguous.

I'm well aware that the rulebook is as official as it gets. I thought there might be some clarification in some other published material that doesn't get shipped with the game (like there is, for example, for Betrayal at House on the Hill).

@weenko Yeah, that's a good point. And it looks like you were right about that, too.


text:
Waddington’s Sorry No 7 rules?
We have been playing Sorry by Waddingtons 1951, 1963 and noticed that there are Amplfied Card Rules and they explain the 7:

Providing the full 7 squares are moved , a split may be used to move 2 men into Home, return 2 opponents’ men Start, use 2 Slides, or a combination of any of the above

I’ve never noticed this before! Can anyone explain this a bit easier, for me to understand?

The 7 card says it can be used in the normal fashion to move a pawn forward seven spaces. It has the special ability, though, to be split among two pawns: moving two pawns a total of seven spaces (e.g., one pawn 2 and the other pawn 5 spaces).
The Amplified explanation you quote is merely telling you that you must use the whole value of the seven and that the pawns so moved might land (that is "are permitted to land") on home or other pawns or slides. They belabor (and perhaps obfuscate) the point by providing a list of several specific examples.
e.g.:

a split may be used to move 2 men into Home

Means that. for moving pawns to home, given that a pawn can only move home by exact count, you can use the 7 card to move two pawns home if the pawns were 1 and 6, 2 and 5, or 3 and 4 spaces from home.
The rest is similar: just more ways in which you might move two pawns. The crux is that the whole seven must be used, and that the pawns being moved are not restricted to "base movement" only, but can move home, land on slides, land on opposing pawns, and so on.

Many thanks for that explanation. It has made it obvious! They explained too much, which confused us! Thanks

@Goody Thanks. If you would, please mark this answer as "accepted" so the site knows this question has an answer.


text:
Which board game is the family Banks playing in Fresh Prince of Bel Air S4E19?
I’m rewatching The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. In season 4 episode 19 “You’d Better Shop Around” the Bankses are playing a board game with cards and pawns. Carlton reads a card to Hilary asking “You’re in a department store and you find $50 on the floor. Do you pick it up?”
Does anyone know what board game they are playing?
A close up of a card is shown here:

A close up of the board:

I haven't watched the episode yet, but it sounds very much like Scruples or a close variant.

The game was very meta, it is very likely a fictional game the writers used to set up the scene between Philip and Ashley Banks.
Ashley read the second game card:

It's clear your teenage daughter is
not enjoying the tedious board game being played in a forced
family-bonding moment.

Philip then says:

Fine. I try to encourage family time together, and this is the thanks I get. If you don't wanna play, you don't have to. Go on, get out of here!

The joke being he then learns the card is real.
I believe the board was fabricated for the scene and the two questions intended to evoke Scruples. That game debuted in 1984, but had been doing updates every five years. That is about the same time as the episode aired on Feb 21, 1994.


text:
MTG: "Up to One Creature ..." Creature is returned to owner's hand, does it fizzle?
So I know a spell will fizzle if its target is returned to hand before the spell resolves. However, if a spell specifies "Up to one" target, then will it still fizzle? Since even if the original target is returned, 0 is a valid "Up to one" resolution.
The card in question is: Banishing Slash
Even if the target was returned to hand, will the second part resolve and create a 2/2 token?

No, if you choose a target and the target is no longer legal as the spell starts to resolve, it will not resolve and you will not get a token.
This is explained in one of the card's rulings:

You may cast Banishing Slash without choosing a target. If you do, and you control both an artifact and an enchantment as it resolves, you'll just create a Samurai token. However, if you do choose a target and that target is an illegal target as Banishing Slash tries to resolve, Banishing Slash won't resolve and none of its effects will happen. The illegal target won't be destroyed and you won't create a Samurai token.