This is a quick way to test out various strategies for the game Take 6.

Here are the results for the strategies I came up with after 1 million games played:

The five strategies tested are quite simple.

• Random is simply playing a random card each game.
• Small is always picking its smallest card.
• Big is always picking its biggest card.
• HeuristicSmall is generally picking its smallest card, except when that card will play on a row that already contains 5 cards. If that is the case, it will select its smallest card that fits on a row of 4 or less. If all rows are rows of 5, then it will pick the card that has the greatest distance with the last card of each row.
• HeuristicBig does the same as HeuristicSmall, except it generally tries to play its largest card.
• Close always plays the card that is the closest to a card already on the table.

Surprisingly (to me, at least), it seems that the Big strategy seems to work best (given that we want to minimize our points).