Surviving the Wretched

The average odds of success seem incredibly low, though it would be hard to get an exact average without running this program a few hundred times and either manually taking the average or packing each victory result into an array, both of which I don't feel like bothering with. It's worth noting that I didn't bother calculating the block tower, because it would be too annoying to figure arbitrary collapse probabilities; someone who has played enough times to actually get one "potential" victory would certainly be a world-champion Jenga player through sheer perseverance anyway, and probably could extract all blocks required to survive in a worst-case scenario. The rules allow for playing without the tower regardless. I also did not simulate the Ace of Spades, because it's unlikely to add a noticeable amount of time, and re-shuffling without reusing discarded cards is ridiculously annoying to implement.

Roughly, the odds of surviving long enough to be rescued are about one in fifty-thousand, though, again, the exact probability is hard to calculate. Some very lucky winning games had the beacon repaired after day 5, but the vast majority of victories repaired both the beacon and the antenna before that point, usually on the first two days. Most escapes also took about 20 days, which means the d6 must have rolled well below the 3.5 average the majority of the time. A rough estimate of the "quick game" alternative option shows that it doesn't really make the game any faster, (though, considering the debrief, that's probably the intent) because the average chance only raises to one in five-thousand. That is still a substantial improvement, but not really enough to matter. A theoretical "super-fast" game type with both escape cards drawn on the first turn again increased the victory chances by a factor of ten, up to one in five-hundred. This would still take several weeks of repeated attempts to actually pull off. The lesson today: pack laser rifles on your salvage trip.

According to the SRD, the intention is to make an incredibly unlikely chance of success, but it's still interesting to see just how unlikely that chance actually is. I do think that this goes a bit beyond "rare;" I would be surprised if any person has legitimately won a W&A game, even with the Ace of Hearts as the top card, and without the tower, which are both legitimate options in the rules.

I would upload the program in full, but it is a mess. If Chris or anyone else wants it for future game-making, I'll provide a copy, but you'll need to understand how to work an IDE if you want to tweak the variables.