Probably my favorite party game. It’s seemingly endless, laugh-out-loud fun. But when some friends and I stayed up way too late attempting to plow through the entire deck, it got me wondering how long the game could actually go.
What amount of time would it take to use up every card combination possible?
In the classic game, each player gets dealt 7 red cards. One player picks a green card, and each of the rest choose a red card to match. For 4 players, this would result in the use of 1 green card and 3 red cards per round. For a single round, then, the number of possible red-to-green combinations is 7³ or 343.
There are 756 red cards and 252 green cards. Thus, in order to use all of the red cards in the stack, 4 players would have to play 756 ÷ (7 x 3) = 36 rounds. Multiplying this by the number of possible outcomes for each round yields 12,348 possible combinations. Since there are no duplicate cards, this accurately represents the smallest number of rounds necessary to exhaust all of the combinations (assuming there are no “repeat” rounds).
But wait…there are 252 possible green cards for each red card combination. Thus, I must multiply 12,348 by 252, resulting in a whopping 3,111,696 — the smallest number of rounds which would need to be played in order to exhaust all possible card combinations.
Assuming each round takes about 30 seconds (a relatively small estimate, I think), the game would last (3,111,696 x 0.5 min) ÷ (60 mins/hr) ÷ (24 hrs/day) ÷ (365.25 days/yr) = 2.958 years straight.
Not days. Not weeks. Not even months.
Years.
On second thought, I don’t think I’ll be trying this.
Intel D 