How does Dobble (Spot It) work?
Why Mathematics Stack Exchange recommends it
Mathematics Stack Exchange commenters link it when questions touch on Dobble-style card designs, finite geometries and set systems where every pair of sets intersects in a fixed number of elements.
Recommended by 2 people across 2 different months, 2021 to 2023.
What it is
Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths explains the mathematics behind the card game Dobble (Spot It), where any two cards share exactly one symbol. He connects it to finite projective planes, shows why the commercial deck leaves out some possible cards, and builds his own larger variant, Monomatch Myriad.
Cited in 1 Wikipedia article, including Dobble.
What people said
Recommends ConMan · 2022-06 · Mathematics Stack Exchange · on “Is there a name for arrangements of n sets consisting of unique single values for the intersection of each k of them?”
This relates to something called affine spaces, and is the basis for the card game Dobble (aka Spot It!) as discussed in this Stand-up Maths video [this video] .
Recommends JMoravitz · 2023-06 · Mathematics Stack Exchange · on “Dobble Algorithm for three or more matches.”
Obligatory youtube link to Matt Parker's (*stand-up maths*) video about the maths of dobble [this video] . The most surprising thing to me was that the standard dobble printing left out two additional possible cards for some unknown reason.
Cites user872441 · 2021-05 · Mathematics Stack Exchange · on “How many cards are needed to have all so all the cards have 10 different pictures and each card has exactly 3 pictures in common with any other card”
We can use a cyclic difference set where every number appears 3 times. said in this video here about the math of Dobble/Spot it! [this video]