Strategy
Mental arithmetic and fast thinking are necessary skills for competitive play. Pencil and paper will slow down a player, and are generally not allowed during play anyway.
There are four-card "hands" when played with a standard 52-card deck. It is impossible to make 24 with some of these, for example 1,1,1,1 while others can be difficult, such as 3,3,8,8: (8/(3-(8/3))=24).
With practice, the ability to spot useful patterns increases. These typically target pairs of factors (2 × 12, 3 × 8, 4 × 6), obvious pairs of summands (6 + 18, 8 + 16, and 10 + 14 appear often) or combinations of these involving the number 1 such as:
The number 1 (or Ace) is also useful as a throwaway card. Since a number times 1 (or divided by 1) is itself, a solution in which only three digits are needed to create 24 is possible by multiplying the 1 by any of the remaining cards. If a 1 is not provided on the card, two numbers may be subtracted (such as 8-7) or divided (6/6) to make a 1.
Possible solutions can be found on the back of 24 Game deck boxes.
Read more about this topic: 24 Game
Famous quotes containing the word strategy:
“Do you think that mere words are strategy and power for war?”
—Bible: Hebrew, 2 Kings 18:20.
“That is the way of youth and life in general: that we do not understand the strategy until after the campaign is over.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (17491832)
“To a first approximation, the intentional strategy consists of treating the object whose behavior you want to predict as a rational agent with beliefs and desires and other mental states exhibiting what Brentano and others call intentionality.”
—Daniel Clement Dennett (b. 1942)