Simulating Virtual Players for UNO without Computers
This addresses the challenge of adding virtual players to physical card games like UNO for small groups, though it is incremental as it adapts existing concepts to a new context.
The paper tackles the problem of simulating virtual players in physical UNO without computers by proposing a protocol that uniformly selects a valid card at random from a virtual player's hand or reports none exists, while keeping the rest of the hand secret.
UNO is a popular multiplayer card game. In each turn, a player has to play a card in their hand having the same number or color as the most recently played card. When having few people, adding virtual players to play the game can easily be done in UNO video games. However, this is a challenging task for physical UNO without computers. In this paper, we propose an unconventional protocol that can simulate virtual players using nothing but physical UNO cards. In particular, our protocol can uniformly select a valid card to play from each virtual player's hand at random, or report that none exists, without revealing the rest of its hand. The protocol can also be applied to simulate virtual players in other turn-based card or tile games where each player has to select a valid card or tile to play in each turn.