Mermaid Overkill

[Desk_Jockey36]

At this point I’ve played enough games to realize the overwhelming amount of mermaid drops in the first ~20 cards. Probably part of the design to make online games more exciting but is extremely frustrating especially from a transition from in person to BGA. Please keep me in check if I’m overthinking it. Makes online play much less desirable since the luck factor is more proportionality skewed online.

[Strode]

At this point I’ve played enough games to realize the overwhelming amount of mermaid drops in the first ~20 cards. Probably part of the design to make online games more exciting but is extremely frustrating especially from a transition from in person to BGA. Please keep me in check if I’m overthinking it. Makes online play much less desirable since the luck factor is more proportionality skewed online.

You're overthinking this. The developer didn't rig the game to make mermaids come out more often.

You could just be experiencing a stretch where mermaids are just coming out a lot due to randomness. Or you could just be misremembering things (very common among BGAers). We'd need some hard data to tell.

[PinguinBen]

Right at his moment I would almost want to agree with you. Because last 2 games I played where one game where I lost first round because of 4 mermaids. And another game where I got twice 3 mermaids. That felt as too many mermaids in a short period of time. But I guess I just see it as (un)lucky, because even though I got all those mermaids, they didn’t help me win.

[Jellby]

I've playen only one physical match, and I lost against mermaids.

It's not the online game, it's the game itself!

[Schneehas3]

Biased.

I have played enough matches to say that it's random.

[BurtLaimer]

You've played under 100 games. It's laughable that you think this is an ample data set to make any sort of claim you are making.

I expected to see at least 1000 games from you; 79 is hilarious.

You are absolutely overthinking this.

[Bread4Ducks]

At this point I’ve played enough games to realize the overwhelming amount of mermaid drops in the first ~20 cards. Probably part of the design to make online games more exciting but is extremely frustrating especially from a transition from in person to BGA. Please keep me in check if I’m overthinking it. Makes online play much less desirable since the luck factor is more proportionality skewed online.

Assuming you're playing the base game (58 cards) then the chance of seeing at least 1 mermaid in the first 20 cards is 82.6%. The chance of seeing at least 2 mermaids is 42.8%. The chance of seeing at least 3 mermaids is 11.3% and the chance of seeing all 4 is 1.1%.

So based on those probabilities it's completely normal to see mermaids in the first 20 cards - in just under half of the rounds you'd expect to see at least 2 show up. This isn't BGG fixing the game to make it more exciting, it's just how the probability works out. If you aren't seeing mermaids frequently in your physical games then either you only have a small sample size or you aren't shuffling properly.

(For those that want to check the maths you'll need to use binomial coefficients [n choose k, written as nCk for shorthand], the probability of exactly m mermaids appearing in the first 20 cards is then:

(4Cm * 54C(20-m))/(58C20)

Then just add up all combinations of m you want.)