Board Game Arena

And there are games on this site that get played thousands of times a day. That 0.01% chance thing? Happens multiple times a day.

Example: Backgammon. In Backgammon rolling doubles is a very good thing, and the higher the dice the better. So double six is the best roll. That’s a 1/36 chance. Which means the chances of doing it three times in a row is, for any given set of three rolls, 1/46656. However, the average backgammon player rolls 33 times per game, which means 31 chances to start a sequence of three double sixes, so now we are down to 1/1505 chances for each player in a given game. And there are two players so now we are down to 1/753 chances of it happening in a given game.

Backgammon was played 50 times in the last half hour. I don’t know how or if you can see how many times a day it is actually played but extrapolating 50 times in a half hour to a full day, that’s 2400 games a day. So that supposedly impossible thing, with a 1/46656 chance? Probably happens three times a day somewhere on BGA.

And that’s just in Backgammon. Lots of other games use a pair of dice, so there are a lot more chances of this happening somewhere, somehow.

That’s probability for you.

In 420 you can win on the first turn of the game with a probability of 2.7%. In Run Buster it's 1.5%.

I don't know how relevant this is to the discussion, but I can't pass up an opportunity for shameless self-promotion.

In backgammon also a skilled player will seem lucky because they set themselves up for good rolls.

In every backgammon site or software (including in one instance, an open source one) there are instances of people complaining about the dice.

People are just bad in general at spotting randomness

BarnardsStar wrote: ↑02 February 2026, 16:56 And there are games on this site that get played thousands of times a day. That 0.01% chance thing? Happens multiple times a day.

Example: Backgammon. In Backgammon rolling doubles is a very good thing, and the higher the dice the better. So double six is the best roll. That’s a 1/36 chance. Which means the chances of doing it three times in a row is, for any given set of three rolls, 1/46656. However, the average backgammon player rolls 33 times per game, which means 31 chances to start a sequence of three double sixes, so now we are down to 1/1505 chances for each player in a given game. And there are two players so now we are down to 1/753 chances of it happening in a given game.

Backgammon was played 50 times in the last half hour. I don’t know how or if you can see how many times a day it is actually played but extrapolating 50 times in a half hour to a full day, that’s 2400 games a day. So that supposedly impossible thing, with a 1/46656 chance? Probably happens three times a day somewhere on BGA.

And that’s just in Backgammon. Lots of other games use a pair of dice, so there are a lot more chances of this happening somewhere, somehow.

That’s probability for you.

This is what a lot of people don't realize or understand.

If a double six gets rolled, some people think the probability of a double six on the next roll is something other than 1/36.

FrankJones wrote: ↑02 February 2026, 14:57 Being a 99.9% favorite means losing 1 time out of 1000. Yeah, I've had that happen too, in a live poker game with no computers to blame for the "bad randomness" or whatever. It happens.

That's expected if you play lots of games. But if the highly unlikely thing happens during what is also the most important game you've ever played on this website, that's the kind of phenomenon that will make someone believe in a higher entity.

Something similar happens with people who are very successful in life. They are faced between those two options "Either I just so happen to be one of the 1% most successful people, or there is some kind of higher entity and I'm one of the main characters in this story. Which one is more likely?".

The type of cruelty commonly exhibited by very successful people can largely be explained by this: things seem to revolve around them so much that they start seeing others as puppets who exist just to decorate the story of their life.

Same goes with miracles. If someone observes a phenomenon that for some reason no one else has ever reported observing, then it can be a rational belief for them to conclude that the existence of a God communicating to them is the most likely explanation.

FrankJones wrote: ↑02 February 2026, 14:57 I had a Wingspan game where I lost a lot of points because the bird feeder did not roll a worm. What are the odds of that !?

That's something that sometimes happens to me in multiplayer games. I make a move based on the assumption that another player will pick a certain thing, but then it turns out they do a terrible move instead, because what seemed obvious to me is apparently not obvious to them. So I end up losing to the third party, which is very ironic, being punished because I couldn't guess that someone was going to do something nonsensical.

One thing I am curious about: does every game that has dice have its own dice rolling code? Or is there a call to a site-wide roller code? If the former, I would not be at all surprised if a few them were faulty and gave nonrandom roll distributions.*

It has happened before, there was an incident on another backgammon site years ago where the dice algorithm was found to returning doubles only 9% of the time instead of 16.6. Confronted with evidence, the site fixed it. Interestingly, many players were upset, and wanted to keep the old roller - they didn't like so many doubles, or didn't believe that the fixed roller was correct.

*of course this is very different from claiming that rolls are conditionally nonrandom, i.e. based on the current game position. This could only be intentional.

stillframe wrote: ↑02 February 2026, 20:05 One thing I am curious about: does every game that has dice have its own dice rolling code? Or is there a call to a site-wide roller code?

Copied from the BGA FAQ (full quote even though I know that you already know about the things they say in the last paragraphs):

For dice and equivalent 'pick a number' actions, we use the PHP function 'random_int'. This function has a cryptographically secure randomness, meaning that it may be even better than real dice.

For card shuffling, we use the PHP method 'shuffle', based on the 'Mersenne Twister' algorithm used by most online Poker websites.

Please note that there are thousands of games played each day on BGA, so a rare event with a very low probability may still happen dozens of times per day on BGA.

Finally, for those of you asking yourselves, "But is that random number generator truly random?" Please check this page from random.org which is a great resource to help you understand the complexity of this question.

stillframe wrote: ↑02 February 2026, 20:05 One thing I am curious about: does every game that has dice have its own dice rolling code? Or is there a call to a site-wide roller code?

https://boardgamearena.com/faq?anchor=f ... ing_random

BarnardsStar wrote: ↑02 February 2026, 16:56 Example: Backgammon. In Backgammon rolling doubles is a very good thing, and the higher the dice the better. So double six is the best roll.

I suspect you are aware and only simplifying for sake of example, but this bit is not true at all. Any roll can be worst, bad, good, or best, depending on the position. 66 is often bad from the bar, or when it forces moves you don't want to make.