Yeah, I beat the quarters game - missed three a piece for the first couple, then two, then only missed once in the last round. Have never been able to beat the marbles game.
This game has been around for a while - there are a couple of ways to beat it. The easiest is to open the game up in two windows, in one widnow have it go first, in the other you go first - then just replicate the moves made in one window to the other. The real solution to the game involves good old binary numbers.