Board Game Arena

When a game feels rigged, we're advised to track the dice rolls to see if we can really find something that seems out of the ordinary for randomness.

But the game doesn't log the actual dice rolls. Do you know of an easy way to be able to do such an analysis?

Why would they not log the dice rolls?

The solution below doesn't work in Can't stop since the dices rolled are not writed on the logs
It work for most others games though.

If you got 5min to understand my document you can use it:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... 1659177939

First create a copy of my document, that way you can modify anything without breaking that shared document.
In "logs" page you need to do two things:
- goes to replay of a game (like this page: https://boardgamearena.com/gamereview?table=393069042 ). Then do ctrl+a (=select all of the page) then ctrl+c (copy what is in the page) and goes in the blue column A and do ctrl+v (paste what you copied).
- goes to column B, and modify the formula. You need to have the formula "=split(logs!A1;"thisthingshouldbeedited";)", and change thisthingshouldbeedited per what you read before the dices.

Then you goes to "dicerolls" page, and depending of the line you modified in the logs, that will change the dice colored in color.
The light part is the sum of the dices.

.

By the way, many complains of randomness of bga on can't stop came from not understanding the rules.
When your turn start, you roll four dices: ABCD.
Then you choose two dices to play together, and the two others are played too.

That mean if you rolled (5a)(6b)(6c)(6d), you can:
- use (5a) with (6b), which give you 11+12
- or use (5a) with (6c), which give you 11+12
- or use (5a) with (6d) which give you 11+12

So you see a board of 5+6+6+6 | 5+6+6+6 | 5+6+6+6, which is in reality 4 differents dices, and not 12.

Can't you see the dice rolls in the replay?

Jellby wrote: ↑03 July 2023, 08:10 Can't you see the dice rolls in the replay?

Yes you can, but it's really annoying to check the dices for more than one game.

Jellby wrote: ↑03 July 2023, 08:10 Can't you see the dice rolls in the replay?

Making it harder and more time consuming to have to log dice rolls yourself makes it more suspicious as to whether the outcomes of games are 'fair' and 'sufficiently random'. I just wondered why they would choose not to log them for us.

zoomboom wrote: ↑29 August 2023, 23:53

Jellby wrote: ↑03 July 2023, 08:10 Can't you see the dice rolls in the replay?

Making it harder and more time consuming to have to log dice rolls yourself makes it more suspicious as to whether the outcomes of games are 'fair' and 'sufficiently random'. I just wondered why they would choose not to log them for us.

Most likely because this site was created in 2010, and Can't Stop was finished in 2011, and the volunteers at the time were probably more concerned with getting bug free games out onto the new site than thinking about how extensive people's interest would be over a decade later in their game logs.

That being said, I would certainly love for the dice rolls to be in the log. Maybe someone will volunteer their time at some point to code it in.

How would a volunteer get access to the source code?

zoomboom wrote: ↑30 August 2023, 01:39 How would a volunteer get access to the source code?

I would probably start by reading the stickies in the developers forum.

I've briefly entertained the thought of trying to develop something as I have some programming background, but I just don't have the free time right now.

I'm pretty sure you need to get a developers account first (which gives you access to the "studio" coding environment that all BGA games are built on.

Using the developers forum (and/or the developers discord) are probably the best place to ask questions if you have some programming skills and can't figure out what you need to do after looking through the FAQs about it.

Remkar wrote: ↑30 August 2023, 01:07 That being said, I would certainly love for the dice rolls to be in the log.

I strongly support this idea. There must be at least 100 "bugs" reported because people thought BGA skipped their turn, when they didn't realize they rolled only for columns already closed on their first roll (at end game).
There is already a suggestion report for this: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=12461 It looks like nobody has worked on it so far, but who ever will do so, will be our hero

Unfortunately, Can't Stop's code isn't available to studio developpers. So only BGA staff has access and can correct bugs.