All of the times so far are based on pure python code running on one core. The raspberry pi 5 has 4 cores. If I incorporate multithreading in some way, that could be an immediate 4x reduction in run time.

Since Pandas is a single thread library, it might make sense to let one core handle the day and night for each game with 4 separate instances of the same script. At a  Python only level, that should bring the 554 years down to 138.5 years. The low end of the PyPy scale shows a 7x improvement over the same code run in straight python, that would bring it down to around near 20 years... not bad from starting at 3,000!

Obviously some research will be required, but that makes some form of c subroutines even more attractive.

Not giving up easily, not giving up at all!

Happy Coding!