a blog about #unfair flips

Unfair Flips is a game about flipping a coin to get 10 Heads flips in a row.

Unfair Flips is a game about how humans interact with variable probability.

Unfair Flips is a game about how people interpret the information presented to them, relative to the seemingly random outcomes they experience.

Unfair Flips is a game about why people play games at all, when there’s only a finite amount of time to experience them.

Unfair Flips is a game with a speedrunning community. The rules of the speedrun say that time starts when the first coin is flipped and ends when one of the various endings occurs and then number of total flips is displayed. The current world-record strategy routeing seems like an optimal series of upgrades to minimize time played, along with a lot of luck. Statistically speaking, the variance in flips will eventally produce a relatively fast run. The minimum required number of flips per run is 10 Heads and no Tails. With enough time across enough runners, it’s possible that someone will even get this lucky. Other speedruns tend to rely on memorization, dexterity, and endurance. While the orders of upgrades could land in those former…

This weekend, I was overcome by the urge to make this extremely specific fanart.

I recently watched Austin and Jack from Friends at the Table play Hthrflwrs’s extremely good new video game Unfair Flips by streaming it on Twitch

Over the course of the roughly three hour stream, Austin and Jack — among other things¹ — invented a pair of delightfully frustrating fictional oligarchs named The Red Duke and The Blue Baron, who alternated between jabs at their subjects (the streamers) and talking to each other about the rousing match of coin flips the were playing vicariously through them.