Voting Results Are In! (alternative version)

Red and Green had done it. They had beaten the Royal Game at the highest difficulty level, without undoing any moves, and all this despite the shenanigans by Blue.

But the big winner was social media. With expert live-commentary entertaining all viewers and dissecting every decision, every good, and every bad card in simple language, social media platforms had every right to boast how they had successfully connected blobs all over the world. Red and Green were relative newcomers. It was well-known the game was beatable with expert play, but nobody expected them to achieve awesomeness on the big stage. But achieve awesomeness they did. The post-match interviews were a blast and Green even improvised a rap song in the iambic pentameter at one point, to thunderous applause.

Red: This is gonna be massive.

Green: Thanks to the wonders of technology, the Royal Game would finally take its rightful place among the likes of Chess, Poker, Bridge or even Tetris 99 Battle Royale. Hang on a moment. What is this?

Green watches a video on his mobile phone. A Blue-skinned player has dealt a row of cards and is considering his options. The video alone has three million views and counting, and one didn’t need a Ph. D. to realise this is statistically significant at the α = 0.05 level.

Green: Blue eventually finds a way to remove a complete suit of Hearts, but in the process, she made it mathematically impossible to win regardless of the permutation of unseen cards. Hence the hashtag “#blueboo”.

Red does not share the slightest concern, his eyes fixed firmly on his own mobile phone.

Red: Incredible Game 5. Magnus Carlsen looks horribly passive but he has correctly calculated there is no way for White to improve his position. A well-earned draw with the Black pieces. No way I could escape like that.

Green: There are a large number of #blueboo tweets going viral thanks to the likes of RojoTheGreat123, RojoTheAwesome456 and RojoTheGM789. Hmmm … these look like bot accounts with a profile pic of a Spanish flag.

Red: I never heard of this #blueboo. When did you –

Green: The overarching narrative seems to be anybody with blue skin is inherently bad at Spider Solitaire. Now you and I both know that even if our Blue-skinned team member played poorly, there is no logical reason why all other Blues on this planet would be just as bad –

Red (squirming in his seat): What does it matter? We proved we can wield a mean deck of cards, who cares what the others th–

Green: You don’t understand. Suppose you took the entire population of Blobs, then add an order of magnitude and have every one of them chant “Red Is Sus! Red Is Sus!” How you would feel … wait a minute, you’re not –

Red stands up and glares at Green. Green races towards the exit only to find the doors locked. <sarcasm> How convenient! </sarcasm> Red pulls out a knife and Green can only stew at the injustice of it all. If only the Random Number Generator had yielded an odd number instead of an even. Red would have been voted off instead of Blue and all the good guys would have lived happily ever after. Instead, here he is – cornered by an Angry Red Blob and having approximately three nano-seconds left to live.

The end.