A Further Analysis of Insect Trading in Shrek Super Party

Sometimes, seemingly simple video game mechanics belie surprising complexity. One old game, Shrek Super Party, is rough around the edges but has a game mechanic that is very computationally interesting. The mechanic operates similarly to poker, but with a few modifications: all “cards” are visible, there are no suits and no straights, and instead of drawing “cards” players move by forcibly swapping their “cards” with other players. In this paper, we generated data from all players moving optimally and then analyzed that data to see what scores each player received on average over many rounds, along with other interesting pieces of data. It is our belief that, although creating an AI to play a game optimally is a valuable avenue of research, observing what happens when a game is played in specific ways is also academically valuable.