Board Game Arena

While playing Herd, my opponent had a bad luck streak, proclaimed the game "rigged," and conceded.

NEWSFLASH #1: I programmed Herd myself, and I didn't make it "rigged." If it was "rigged," I'd probably have a higher rating than 156.

NEWSFLASH #2: Luck streaks happen, both good and bad. It's perfectly natural. Nothing to be alarmed about. If you seem to have perpetually bad luck, it's probably low skill - not bad luck.

I seriously doubt if any of the games at BGA are "rigged." If there was one, there would be a flood of well reasoned complaints, and the administrators would look into it and shut it down.

If you happen to have a bad luck streak, don't start pointing fingers and making accusations. Just accept it for what it was. Nature selected you for bad luck in this instance. It wasn't personal.

If you aren't intellectually or emotionally equipped to tolerate bad luck streaks, you probably shouldn't play games with luck.

I wouldn't take this personally, I think between sore losers and the human tendency to see patterns in noise, and poor understanding of probability, I've seen this reaction in a ton of games that have some random element. I don't know if you know what VASSAL is, but it's an open-source, very simple game platform and I remember people coming up with conspiracies about how for a particular game I played, it was completely rigged, even though it just got a (pseudo)random number between 1-6 and it had no way to know what you were rolling for or whether a high or a low roll was even good for any particular player in that situation. Some people were convinced there was some reasonably good gameplaying AI 15 years ago in an implementation where you just typed !roll and it picked a number 1-6 for whatever it was the dice were rolling without any connection to game mechanics.


Online Magic is even worse, people can lose a coin flip for who goes first 4 times in a row and claim that it must be rigged, and you see that kind of complaint daily. Or that it doesn't shuffle correctly because they keep seeing pairs of the same card when it's 4/60, and any mention of the birthday paradox will get you downvoted by these conspiracy theorists.


People are really bad at probability and like to blame losses on conspiracies instead of random chance. But I just wanted to say, you're not alone, people do this with every game.

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