To paraphrase French-Algerian thinker Albert Camus: One should think about the coin flipper completely satisfied.
In Unfair Flips, launched on Steam immediately by developer Heather Flowers, you’ve gotten a coin and a button. The button flips the coin. To win, you need to flip ten heads in a row.
Initially, you solely have a 20% probability of flipping heads. That is, because the title suggests, unfair.
It would doubtless take 1000’s of flips, and you will have to manually click on for every one. Fortunately, flipping heads rewards you with cash. With that cash, you should purchase upgrades, rising the coin’s worth, your flip pace, your money combo multiplier, and—crucially—rising your probability of flipping heads.
As the sport itself tells you, “that is all the recreation.” You flip, and you then improve your flips, and you then flip till you win. However Unfair Flips is not actually about flipping heads, or incrementally upgrading your odds and earnings, or stacking combo multipliers for a jolt of post-Balatro dopamine.
Unfair Flips is a recreation about negotiating the temptations of superstition.
It is a recreation concerning the human thoughts’s instinctive drive to seek out which means the place there may be none—to assign some particular significance to when a coin does or doesn’t land how we might like. It is a recreation about creating a faint fear that you’re going to anger the coin should you improve it in the course of a sizzling streak. It is a recreation about debating with your self whether or not a coin touchdown tails aspect up a full 18 occasions in a row is a quirk of probability or proof of sinister intent.
It is a recreation about getting 4 heads in a row regardless of solely having a 30% heads probability, and questioning should you’re doing one thing proper. After which laughing to your self, due to course you possibly can’t be doing one thing proper. There’s nothing to do mistaken. There’s solely chance.
Proper?
It is doable that, regardless of its insistence on chance’s cruel and inviolable fact, Unfair Flips is participating in trickery—that there are invisible manipulations guiding the countless procession of Tails, Tails, Tails, Heads, Tails alongside a intentionally maddening contour.
I’ve no method of understanding, and not one of the experience essential to show by some means. I am content material to flip with the assumption that 20% is 20%.
It took me 1,832 flips.
Unfair Flips is on the market on Steam now. It prices $2 USD.
