To paraphrase French-Algerian thinker Albert Camus: One must imagine the coin flipper happy.
In Unfair Flips, released on Steam today by developer Heather Flowers, you have a coin and a button. The button flips the coin. To win, you have to flip ten heads in a row.
Initially, you only have a 20% chance of flipping heads. This is, as the name suggests, unfair.
It will likely take thousands of flips, and you’ll have to manually click for each one. Thankfully, flipping heads rewards you with money. With that money, you can purchase upgrades, increasing the coin’s value, your flip speed, your cash combo multiplier, and—crucially—increasing your chance of flipping heads.
As the game itself tells you, “this is the entire game.” You flip, and then you upgrade your flips, and then you flip until you win. But Unfair Flips isn’t really about flipping heads, or incrementally upgrading your odds and income, or stacking combo multipliers for a jolt of post-Balatro dopamine.
Unfair Flips is a game about negotiating the temptations of superstition.
It’s a game about the human mind’s instinctive drive to find meaning where there is none—to assign some special significance to when a coin does or does not land how we’d like. It’s a game about developing a faint worry that you’ll anger the coin if you upgrade it in the middle of a hot streak. It’s a game about debating with yourself whether a coin landing tails side up a full 18 times in a row is a quirk of chance or proof of sinister intent.
It’s a game about getting four heads in a row despite only having a 30% heads chance, and wondering if you’re doing something right. And then laughing to yourself, because of course you can’t be doing something right. There’s nothing to do wrong. There’s only probability.
Right?
It’s possible that, despite its insistence on probability’s merciless and inviolable truth, Unfair Flips is engaging in trickery—that there are invisible manipulations guiding the endless procession of Tails, Tails, Tails, Heads, Tails along a deliberately maddening contour.
I have no way of knowing, and none of the expertise necessary to prove one way or the other. I’m content to flip with the belief that 20% is 20%.
It took me 1,832 flips.
Unfair Flips is available on Steam now. It costs $2 USD.
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