By the Numbers

The Longest Word Possible

In a two player game the longest word possible to complete is 16 letters. It is also highly unlikely. The biggest seen in playtesting has been 14 letters, for the word commensurately of which 13 of the 14 letters came out. That last Y didn’t appear. Of course the target word was changed a couple of times along the way. The biggest words that get complete tend to top out at about 11 letters. Again they tend to build up with changes to the target word.

Once and only once in playtesting, which was a couple of hundred games, has an 11 letter been said in a Kiitos round (I can’t remember what the word was), every letter followed and it went into a face-up positive pile. That happened in a 4 player game and we all said “what were the chances?” My maths skills, not withstanding, we figured it was about 1 in 168,000.

Longer words are a little easier to get out in a 4 player game, than a 2 player game. Longer words are also easier to get out in Super-Kiitos rounds.

But how do you do the maths? Let’s take an example. My playtest buddy played a V and said VOLCANO. he also had the L, A and O in hand. (I’ve got to say that was a clever play of his to start with. You can see why I often lose). It happens that I had an O C and N, all reasonably common letters.
All things being equal, if it is at the start of the game what is the chances of your opponent having an O, C and an N in your hand? There are 4 Os in the deck. Using the hypergeometric distribution function, that means there is a 50% chance your opponent has at least one O. But my playtest buddy also had an O in his hand so it is approx 40%. There’s 3 Ns in the deck, so that is about 40% as well. There’s only 2 Cs, and the chance they have one or two Cs is 28%. Multiply those 3 percentages together and my playtest buddy had about a 4 and half percent chance of pulling off VOLCANO. It was skill and luck.

Biggest winning and losing margins

Theoretically one player could end up owning every letter in the deck in their negative pile, if the last word was 16 letters long. And over 3 rounds, plus lose 24 challenges, and the worst score possible is -240. Conversely +216 is the biggest score possible.

Across the last 100 2 player play-test games:
My biggest winning margin has been 102 with a score of 58 to -44.
My biggest losing margin has been 97 on a score of 49 to -58.
The average winning margin was 5 points.
Our avg scores have been -5.5 and -10.9 and I’ve won 46 of them. Tied 1 and lost 53.

The best words of some of the games have been : eftsoons, schlepped, fripperies, afficianado, groundswell, bellyflopped, orangeries, trifacial, thrombus and kidult.
Kiitos is not your average word game.