Marvel Snap has been a hit with the mobile card game taking up plenty of attention, even from those who'd previously not played many card games before. Using the power status and abilities of various Marvel cards, featuring superheroes like Iron Man and Mister Fantastic, players vie to dominate the board, trying to get the highest score in order to win, at each of the three locations. Some players have been able to take this to the extreme racking up totally outlandish numbers.
But one player went a bit too far it seems and ended up with a score of 2,147,483,647. He won the location on the left with this score, beating out a relatively lowly 12. But since this location, The Nexus, gives the players the ability to transfer their power to other locations, the player was able to triple up their score across the entire board. You'd think this would be a knockout win for them (and some) but somehow they lost.
As you can see in the picture, the player known as "Warm" and who's sporting a Blade avatar has a score of two billion on the left location, but on the other two locations he's somehow minus two billion even though the other two locations have benign powers associated with them ('When a card moves here, give it +2 power" and "There is a turn 7 this game").
The play was posted on the Marvel Snap subreddit by the player with the thread titled: "How did I lose?" (linked above). It's a valid question and from the answers of the community it appears the player might've simply broken the game with such an enormous score.
"Not 100 percent sure, but games in general can calculate up to a certain number. If you exceed that number you go to the least possible number," one redditor replied. The OP responded rather wryly: "I'll try to keep my power lower than 2 billion then lol".
For those in the lower pools, you might also be wondering just how the player was even able to reach such a staggeringly high score. It's all to do with the cards they played of course. One redditor explained it well (thanks RGCarter).
"Wong makes your on reveal happen twice as his ongoing effect. Onslaught doubles that ongoing effect and Mystique copies the ongoing effect of your last card (here she was played right after Onslaught). This means that Onslaught and Mystique both double Wong, but they also double each other, which leads to an immense number of on reveal activations for Black Panther, resulting in basically breaking the system on the match and turning into negative score."
TLDR, basically Black Panther's power, which has a base power of 4 although this already gets doubled when it is revealed, is being doubled a ridiculous amount of times thanks to the combined doubling effects of Wong, Mystique and Onslaught, leading to an exponential growth of Black Panther's power.
Unfortunately, the number reaches what's known as the interger overflow for the game. Simply put the max value was exceeded, the computer couldn't handle it, and the value was changed to a negative number on the other locations. It's a shame because this might've been a win for the ages.
It's somewhat surprising too that the game's designers did not foresee players maxing out scores in this way. But until an update sorts this issue out, you've been warned Snap players. Do try to keep your scores lower than 2,147,483,647 for now at least.