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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

Back when I was in game dev, I really wanted to find a way to make them fun even when you lost. I never managed to grok that magic, but I did see it in e.g. Settlers of Catan.

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This becomes a different beast when you introduce competitive play. In non-ranked there is this feeling of freedom to try new things, have fun, etc... but in ranked it feels like things are on the line(despite those things being so trivial as a few points up or down).

Settlers is so fun because you really feel like you're on a journey the whole game, and while it is nice to win, you remember the interactions and experiences in the game as the valuable thing(IMO).

Unless the dice fuck you over extra hard x)

Play with a deck of cards instead of dice! 36 cards, six sevens, five eights and sixes and so on.

How is that supposed to help? A bad run is a bad run no matter the randomizer. Also cards need to be shuffled which wastes time if done correctly

A deck of cards behaves the way the gambler's fallacy expects everything to behave: after enough bad luck, you're sure to get a good result.

I've taken to calling that the gambler's fallacy fallacy: the misapprehension that a randomness can only arise in situations where the events are uncorrelated. The randomness in Tetris is another good example: when you think you're due for an I, you actually are.

Tetris actually uses two entirely different algorithms, one classic and one modern. Classic is randint(1,7), modern is shuffling "decks" of the 7 pieces and repeating.

I actually did a similar thing using a python script! shuffle(all_combinations[: -10]), and repeat forever. Change the -10 to whatever you want: take everything and you've got your solution, put -35 and you've got random dice again. -10 is a nice middle term, also avoids that at the end of the deck results become too certain.

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