Board Game Arena

The title says it all.

For a while now (approximately 2/3 months), I often draw cards in pair (sometimes across two days), and even get regularly three times the same card in my opening hand...

I remember noticing when it started to happen, because it was quite an obvious change, and I thought 'oh well they are tweaking their randomization algorithm'. But it never changed. And I'm tired of it.

Is it just me?

C4CTU5 wrote: ↑02 February 2026, 18:06 The title says it all.

For a while now (approximately 2/3 months), I often draw cards in pair (sometimes across two days), and even get regularly three times the same card in my opening hand...

I remember noticing when it started to happen, because it was quite an obvious change, and I thought 'oh well they are tweaking their randomization algorithm'. But it never changed. And I'm tired of it.

Is it just me?

There have been absolutely no change made to the randomization, it's a very basic random function with absolutely no bias, as opposite to the human mind that is really bad at perceiving randomness.

The human mind is good at perceiving patterns where there is none, which is a well documented bias, it is not 'bad at perceiving randomness'.
And when it comes to programming randomness, no, it is not a 'very basic function'. True randomness is pretty much impossible to generate.

With that being said, I might be totally wrong when I claim that I perceived a change in the algorithm.
I just wanted feedback from other users, because I know for sure that others share my view/bias, but thanks for your kind words.

i have taken photos of my firts draw... several times 3 copys of 2 cards and that's it!
i kind of hate BGA for this, is very unregular the way it shuffle the cards

C4CTU5 wrote: ↑07 February 2026, 02:59 The human mind is good at perceiving patterns where there is none, which is a well documented bias, it is not 'bad at perceiving randomness'.
And when it comes to programming randomness, no, it is not a 'very basic function'. True randomness is pretty much impossible to generate.

With that being said, I might be totally wrong when I claim that I perceived a change in the algorithm.
I just wanted feedback from other users, because I know for sure that others share my view/bias, but thanks for your kind words.

Hum no, human are bad at perceiving and generating randomness. We have the tendancy to over-represent and under-represent some sequences.
And programming pseudo-randomness is quite a basic task now and is perfectly fine as long as you are not dealing with crypto security. The function is built-in in the programming language used on BGA and using this under the hood : https://www.php.net/manual/fr/function.mt-rand.php.
But even if you think pseudo-randomness is not random enough, your initial claim is that something changed and that's just false since as I said, no change were made whatsoever to any part of the code involved.

Exalts_Kaz wrote: ↑07 February 2026, 03:03 i have taken photos of my firts draw... several times 3 copys of 2 cards and that's it!
i kind of hate BGA for this, is very unregular the way it shuffle the cards

I did some simulations with googlesheet.

I took your own deck (8 cards with 3 copies, 5 cards with 2 copies, 5 cards with one copy):

In 5000 simulations I got 3 games out of 5000 which give me exactly 3 pairs. That's 0.74%. That should happen one time out of 1667.
You got 1000 games on this site, so that could have happen to you once, twice would be unlikely.


Note that I didn't count games where you got 3 copies +2 copies +1 copy. That's as worst than those cases and overall would increase the chance to get a 'weird hand'.

(Not much readable: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing but you can mess with it)