How to tell apart from different types of grouping games?

paul.sellari

I seem to have a difficult time telling apart (or recognizing ) grouping games w/ a chart, regular grouping games, and grouping games with sub-catagories. Is there anything in the questions that makes know which game is which? or does it just come from expierence?

DaBears85

I feel like once you do enough of the games you start seeing patterns and eventually you will know how to attack the game fairly quickly. I am currently foolproofing 1-35 and am on 15 currently and I feel like I am just starting to get the hang of what kind of setup to use without looking at JY's explanation. My advice is to just keep practicing and exposing yourself to as many problems as possible and it will start to come naturally.

Hope this helps!

BlindReviewer

This is a good question, and I think writing the differences out to yourself on a word document would be helpful (that's what I did). The main way you can tell them apart is what element of the grouping game is "unbounded" -- so sometimes you might get the board itself (3 items per group), but the pieces can repeat. Or you might have 5 pieces, but the board itself is undetermined (this is usually with group 1 has more pieces than group 2, or other conditional rules). I try to identify that on my first read of the stimulus because I know that whatever is unbounded, whether it be the board or the pieces, is where the inferences are gonna come in.

paul.sellari

@BlindReviewer said:
This is a good question, and I think writing the differences out to yourself on a word document would be helpful (that's what I did). The main way you can tell them apart is what element of the grouping game is "unbounded" -- so sometimes you might get the board itself (3 items per group), but the pieces can repeat. Or you might have 5 pieces, but the board itself is undetermined (this is usually with group 1 has more pieces than group 2, or other conditional rules). I try to identify that on my first read of the stimulus because I know that whatever is unbounded, whether it be the board or the pieces, is where the inferences are gonna come in.

This helps a lot, I did notice the only difference between grouping games and grouping games w/ a chart is the game pieces can repeat in w/ a chart, but in normal grouping games it always states " visits EXACTLY one of three..." or something like that.

Can you elaborate on "Or you might have 5 pieces, but the board itself is undetermined (this is usually with group 1 has more pieces than group 2, or other conditional rules). "

Do you just mean that instead of the game pieces repeating, it is the members of the game board repeating? So, as long as one party is allowed to repeat, it will be sub-categories?

Thanks in advance bud

BlindReviewer

@"paul.sellari"

Can you elaborate on "Or you might have 5 pieces, but the board itself is undetermined (this is usually with group 1 has more pieces than group 2, or other conditional rules). "

Not 100% what you mean in your explanation, but I can clarify what I meant in the quoted section above. Basically, what makes grouping games difficult is that you'll either have the number of game pieces determined, or you'll have number of slots in each group determined. I think the former is more common, where it'll say there are 5 kids, and three groups, put them in each group. The latter is also common, though maybe a little less so, where it'll say 5 kids can volunteer on each day of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and there are 3 volunteers each day (so in this case, there must be 4 members who repeat).

In the above quote, I was referring to games where the number of pieces is determined, but the number of slots per group is not. This is usually when you have rules like "Group 1 must have more members than Group 2" or the rules just never tell you how many go in each slot. In these situations, it's usually that we have to spend time up front figuring out how many slots can go in each group, rather than who can repeat (because we're given how many pieces there are). I hope this clarifies what I meant by part of the game being "unbounded" -- either which pieces repeat, or how many pieces can go in each slot. After all, it would be really easy if I told you to sort 5 kids into three groups, in a 2-2-1 distribution (these games also exist!).

Lastly, I spent a lot of time thinking about charts and when to use them (I hope to make a longer post about it once I actually figure it out lol). But I think charts are most effective when both the repeatability and the number of slots in each group are both undetermined. In this case it's pretty hard to keep track of what goes where, so a chart really helps.