Unfair Flips (Flowers, 2025)
Developed/Published by: Heather Flowers
Released: 25/09/2025
Completed: 17/11/2025
Completion: Nine heads with an unlikely 40% chance and then the coin landed on its side. I’m taking it.
Q-UP (Everybody House Games, 2025)
Developed/Published by: Everybody House Games
Released: 5/11/2025
Completed: 20/11/2025
Completion: Finished it with the Medic.
Oh, I didn’t think I’d do another one of these joint essays again so soon. However, with there being two games about flipping coins released within a couple of months of each it does feel like I’d just be repeating myself if I wrote two different articles, so here we are.
I did a jokey question on The Insert Credit Podcast about this: “Why is coin flipping so hot right now?” despite the fact that I feel like I know the answer: it’s our old friend simultaneous discovery. Yes, I may be an agnostic, but I also apparently believe that ideas float around in the sky and fall into multiple people’s heads at the same time. And it’s more people than actually act on it too, which explains how I invented nasal strips sometime in the late 80s as a child who suffered stuffiness far too often (should have made a bigger deal of it even though my prototype—sellotape and a broken toothpick—wasn’t that great.)
The more obvious answer, you’d think, would be Australian streamer/comedy man Tom Walker, who I best know for being on best TV show Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee, but I first heard of for playing GTA IV with all the cars set to 9999% speed. However before that, at the very start of 2024, he did a coin flipping stream, where he attempted to flip a coin heads ten times in a row, but every time he flipped ten tails in a row, he’d add an extra heads (meaning he’d have to flip eleven, or twelve…) This took over eight hours, and while there might have been other coin flipping streams before or since (he actually does joke during the stream that it’s “Mr. Beast shit”) it’s the one that seemed to stick in people’s imagination. But, and it’s an important but, Unfair Flips and Q-UP are not really about the coin flips.
In Unfair Flips, you’re trying to flip a coin heads ten times in a row, but the game fucks with the odds in an explicitly video gamey way. The focus of Unfair Flips is probability, and a player’s ability to understand it.
In Q-UP, however, you’re not going for an unlikely number of heads in a row–you’re playing “best of three” flips against opponents. The focus of Q-UP is the idea that in a perfectly matched ranking system–where you’d always play an opponent with equal skill level to yourself–you’d have a 50% chance of winning, so you might as well just flip a coin and skip all that playing the game.
When I describe it like that, you’d think “alright, well, those are both really different concepts to explore, and both games explore them in really different ways. Why if they didn’t both feature coin flipping, there’d be no reason to pair them. In fact, maybe there isn’t!”
But underlying thing that both games are exploring is twofold. One: the ways in which people do or do not trust computers, and two: that game design was broken to combat that, and in doing so a precedent was set that has allowed bad actors to create not “fun games for us to play”, but “products that dole out enough reward on a regular enough schedule to keep us chained to them.”
[“Fucking Christ. Is this another article about how capitalism is to blame for everything?–Ed.] I promise it isn’t. Well, maybe a little.
Something that’s really stood out to me about Unfair Flips–or rather, the discourse around it, which I’m well aware I’m massively behind–is how often people said it was a game about “how bad gamers were at understanding probability.”
This is generally put down to “fake RNG [random number generation]” aka “bad luck protection” where if you fail on a 10% chance the next time it might be an 11% chance (or more!) while still telling you it’s a 10% chance to try and make sure you eventually get the endorphins you so richly deserve. My position is that, well, people who play games are not actually bad at understanding probability! The industry is invested in making them not actually engage with it!
Criticise me for supposition and anecdotal evidence here if you like, but people who play video games, “gamers” if you absolutely must, often play tabletop RPGs and board and card games, and something about those is that you cannot massage the odds progressively1. Anyone who has played anything from Candy Land up is aware of the experience of hitting one after one or hitting the exact roll required for the worst outcome despite long odds, and card game players are especially in tune with the uneven way your odds can play out: I played Netrunner competitively for years, and there’s not a player of that who doesn’t understand that if you put three copies of a card in your 44 card deck, and then riffle shuffle enough to get “perfect” randomness (seven shuffles, isn’t it?) you’ll still play far more games than you like where you’re not going to draw one of those cards in the first 15 draws and instead find them all clumped at the bottom.
Indeed, there are entire games where the reality of RNG is what makes them legendary. In Blood Bowl, a couple of bad rolls can destroy months if not years of work, and the game is almost entirely about trying to make sure you never do anything where you haven’t stacked the odds in your favour as much as possible, and you still have to expect it to go wrong. And people love it for the incredible highs and incredible lows.
Blood Bowl is a great example, though. In video game form the game uses “real” RNG, and yet there are many players who jump online to complain that the rolls are “rigged” in some way despite there being no evidence (their evidence, of course, generally relaying to them not hitting within some range of probability with what they think is some excessive amount of logged rolls.)
In a video game, we are not touching the dice; we are not shuffling the cards. We’re not touching anything real, so we don’t trust it. Every game we play with a computer is like visiting the casino, but the croupier is behind a curtain and he just yells out “no, sorry, you lost. Try again?” every time. We’re already seeing an illusion, so why should we trust anything about it? I’m struck by the comparison to the conclusion from that 4 hour Defunctland video a while back everyone was wild about (it is very good): visitors to theme parks get bored, and quickly, with fully computerised characters because they don’t feel real. That there’s this seeming paradoxical aspect that you prefer a Mickey where you know there’s a guy in a suit because it’s the knowledge that there’s a fourth wall that allows you to stand on the other side of it. You can trust the parameters of the experience and understand the limits the way you can’t with a robot.
So I really don’t believe people are naturally bad at understanding probabilities. And I do believe that “bad luck protection” was made with a genuine attempt to give the player an edge over the house not to fix the odds but repair trust. It’s a real “note under the note” fix, so elegant I’m sure even people implementing it don’t see what the real issue is.
The problem, of course, is that messing with odds in a way that players don’t understand presents an absolutely huge opportunity to fuck with a player’s brain chemistry to keep them playing. If you can take a player from “I don’t trust the machine’s odds” to “I am guaranteed to hit once every ten times because it says so” by repeatedly giving them slanted odds, it means you can give players the kind of shitey unfair odds that appear in gatcha games–1% chance or far worse –and they’ll keep playing or spending thinking they’re not really gambling at all.
This is where Unfair Flips steps in. Unfair Flips starts you with a 20% chance, makes explicit that this is the real odds, and things are so boiled down to one probability, and you flip the coin so many times that you actually cannot help but see the croupier behind the curtain is (for once) playing you straight. Tails. Tails. Tails. It’s doing it, alright. Tails. Tails. Tails. By jove, it’s doing it.
They then tie this to the exact kind of levelling system that is (if you allow the pun) the other side of the engagement coin: slowly doled out improvement that keeps you playing. Not just the hit of the “unlikely” wins, but the guaranteed hit, with enough time, of seeing a number go up.
There really isn’t anything more to Unfair Flips, but that’s what makes it brilliant. It’s a laser sight trained on the basest tricks that game designers play on us, and there’s nowhere to hide from it. You’re not competing to beat a system, you’re not even in a casino. You’re on a treadmill.
The only issue I have with Unfair Flips is in the end it overplays its hand [“Hang on, I thought you said we weren’t in a casino”–Ed.] by making the final flip actually only have a 10% chance of being heads with the others being gag endings. The game has already made its point about the ultimate meaninglessness of the treadmill, it does feel like a theft of something to not just play it out for real. I know it’s called Unfair Flips, but if you understand what some players might go through to get the final heads… I mean, you’ve made your point.
Q-UP is, at heart, an e-sports parody. In body, however, it is very much an escalation-focused incremental game2, designed, as it is, by a team that included Frank Lantz, designer of Universal Paperclips. I wasn’t super hot on Universal Paperclips–as is often the case, I think I was too harsh–but I agree that it does fall prey to the old “alright, I get the idea already!” issue that your, ahem, academic kind of games can have.
Q-UP masks this with an extravagance of mechanics. It’s kind of the joke. If a general player’s experience of an e-sport is that games boil down to a coin flip, then all of the other stuff you’re doing–your character, your loadout of items and abilities–all modify experience rather than outcomes. It’s (immediately) one of the most challenging things about Q-UP compared to the completely transparent nature of Unfair Flips–the game is all obfuscation, and poorly explains things in a way that I have to assume is also a joke (when I tried to play Marvel Rivals when it launched, it felt exactly as baffling) but doesn’t exactly lead to a smooth on-ramp.
We were coming to this metaphor, and I apologise, but these games are two sides of the same coin. Unfair Flips lays bare the trick; Q-UP makes the lie so huge, and so ridiculous, that you see right through it.
It does this by making the coin flips completely meaningless. It doesn’t matter if you trust the computer or not: the game isn’t about the matches, it’s about the metagame. I know this experience. I may have bounced off Marvel Rivals immediately, but I’ve played both Dead By Daylight and Marvel Snap for far longer than I imagined I would (and the latter, in an actively unhealthy way.) In Dead By Daylight the game became more about unlocking things than it was about actually playing it by the end (I think every player of any live service game knows the experience of realising you’re logging in to collect the free currency or daily unlocks for a game you don’t actually have any interest in playing.) In Marvel Snap, it was always about climbing that monthly ladder, and that game was almost as transparent as Q-UP: pretty much every competitive deck had a win/loss ratio that hovered around a coin flip, and climbing was just about putting in the time. Rather than making sure you unlock the right cards, in Q-UP you have to make the numbers bigger, but it’s the same thing: you spend time to climb the ladder. Time is the only real currency.
For what it’s worth: I think players understand this just as well as probability, and just like fake RNG, ranked ladder is the comforting lie that keeps us playing. God knows I played enough games of Marvel Snap aware that eventually the game would feed me a bot where I’d make up all my losses and then some.
The problem with Q-UP merging an incremental with ranked ladder, even if it’s in service of a critique, it does the exact thing that it’s critiquing! Q-UP actually is just the treadmill for, like, eight hours, and it doesn’t really matter if the game is going “ha ha, this is stupid, right?” if you’re locked into the loop. And you can, very easily, get locked into the loop. If you gel with the systems, Q-UP pops as those numbers get ever higher. Q-UP is the kind of game where I don’t think I had a great time playing it–you really are just watching a coin flip and numbers go up–but I couldn’t stop thanks to the next unlocks or the ranking system that forms the game’s core critique.
Q-UP’s problem, ultimately, might be the same as Universal Paperclips–the fact that once the player gets it… what then? In his essay, “Qing-UP in the Age of Tilt” Q-UP’s designer James Lantz discusses a lot of the things I’ve discussed in this essay, but he also makes a point of saying this:
“Q-UP wasn’t built as a commentary on the state of the world. First and foremost, the game is designed to be funny, engaging and addictive.” [My emphasis.]
This is quite apparent in that as much as the gag of Q-UP is laced through every aspect of it, the game is also extremely carefully designed. The live service-style game screens might be ironic, but they present deep and complicated systems that reward you for engaging with them. There are multiple characters with wildly different skill trees and the entire thing builds towards what is meant to be an actually competitive postgame where you’ve built your engine up incrementally with a squad to the point where you’re just making absurd numbers.
I’ll be honest–it was overcomplicated in a way that was beyond my willingness to engage beyond “I get the joke.” I reached a point where I had to look up character builds to understand what I was doing, and… I still didn’t. The character’s skills are placed in a huge matrix that has a trigger order based on placement, if they trigger from heads or tails (and so on) and it’s about two steps beyond rewarding for me, though I know it would be catnip for many. I got to the end with a build that made sense to me, but it was missing triggers left and right, and I really had no way of working out how I would fix it.
Q-UP also has a story (of sorts) to keep you going. It’s jammed away in the game’s email system and it’s… I guess it’s there, but it added so little to the experience I was a bit surprised they bothered. I suppose it’s supposed to be funny, but when the entire experience is sort of a joke, it’s gilding the lily and as with Baby Steps, it just didn’t click with me.
If Unfair Flips is a dagger [“Hang on, I thought you said it was a laser sight”–Ed.] then Q-UP is some sort of a… blunderbuss. It’s still hitting the target, but it’s done it via overwhelming scattershot, and the collateral damage is, in my opinion, too much to bear.
So what’s my conclusion? Unfair Flips and Q-UP are both very, very good at what they’ve chosen to do–one minimalist, one maximalist. They ask the audience to take the reality of the dark patterns of game development on the chin, and I hope–and believe–that both leave players with a lasting insight of things that they probably understood, but had never deeply considered. But if Unfair Flips wants you to learn your lesson, Q-UP seems to want you to keep engaging anyway.
Will I ever play them again? I was done with Unfair Flips so hilariously quickly, I did fancy playing it again. But I learned the lesson! With Q-UP, I really just am not interested in learning any of the other characters. The design is good, but there’s the same emptiness at its heart.
Final Thought: That Q-UP wants you to keep engaging with the systems it critiques is understandable with further context from Lantz’s essay; he makes a point of saying that neither fake RNG or Ranked Ladder are “evil.” It’s getting into something really thorny to discuss the ethics of game design, but let’s here take some shorthand and say that it’s what you do with game design that matters. Frankly, the standpoint this essay comes from is that the design patterns of Unfair Flips and Q-UP are used elsewhere to eat up people’s money, time, and ultimately their happiness, because they exist within the context of late-stage capitalism, and [“Oh for Christ’s sake. I’m cutting this essay off now”–Ed.]
- A tabletop DM with hidden rolls can, will, often does massage wins and losses, but that’s not really the point here. ↩︎
- I notice people don’t make a point of this distinction, generally. Unfair Flips is an incremental game, but it’s not focused on getting comically huge numbers. I think there’s a meaningful difference there that should be given a genre marker for clarity. I’m partial to “exponential incremental” but I got cold feet about the specificity of exponential… ↩︎
