Unfair Flips is a game about flipping a coin. And despite being designed around random chance, it has a vibrant speedrunning community, racing to see who can get to 10 heads the fastest.

That’s the only goal. You earn money with each heads and can spend that on four things: a more valuable coin, a combo multiplier for heads streaks, a faster flip time, and an increased heads chance, which starts at 20 percent and maxes out at 60 percent. When you get lucky enough, you flip 10 heads. Until then, the only thing you can do is keep flipping the coin. The current world record took 96 flips and two minutes and 52 seconds by a speedrunner who goes by ravspect. It was, he says, “nearly complete luck.”

But only nearly. The perfect run would essentially be entirely good fortune — it is hypothetically possible for someone to load the game and flip 10 heads in a row instantly, ending it in about 20 seconds. The odds of this are a hair under one in 20 million. But the thing about probability is that if enough players try for long enough, it eventually becomes statistically likely. Until then, there are a few things that can give a runner an edge, predominantly around upgrade strategy. A Discord community that originally grew up around some of developer Heather Flowers’ earlier games now has channels dedicated to figuring out the perfect approach. “Talking about the ‘nuance’ of flipping a coin might sound crazy, but they were a massive help,” says ravspect.

One of these community number crunchers, Laika, made a spreadsheet calculating how much money you make depending on combo multiplier and coin value. “I hoped it would help us understand the game better and to develop the best strategy for buying upgrades,” she says, but tells me so far the only concrete discovery is that it’s not worth it to buy a second combo multiplier before upgrading the coin twice. In other words, Unfair Flips is not a solved game.

Not without using additional software, anyway. But a player called Four spent about 20 hours in a single weekend to prove that it’s possible to force a perfect run by cracking the random number generator seed to find one where it’s predetermined that the coin will land heads 10 times. An alternative option would be to figure out the perfect time to start flipping by using software to “watch” the figure in the background sip their drink, since this is also partially randomized. (The figure’s name is Gar, and the drink is milk, although you won’t find these details in the game, which is about flipping a coin and only flipping a coin.) It’s estimated that this would take “days or weeks,” but since the speedrun timer only begins on the first flip, the run itself would be under 20 seconds.

“You’re literally just rawdogging random chance.”

A more concrete tactic than obsessively watching a masked man drink milk is multi-instancing. Players open multiple versions of the game after their first heads, and if none of those flip heads, they can try again by beginning the quit-out process in the original version and then canceling it by instead muting and unmuting the game, which resets the save. “This process takes like three to four minutes if you’re really good at the tech,” says Flowers. These runs are listed separately, and the world record is currently 2:51, a single second faster than ravspect’s pure-luck world record.

Unfair Flips is a game that very directly addresses our relationship to probability as humans and within the games industry. “It is saying, how little of a game can somebody make while still keeping that same level of compulsion to continue playing?” Flowers tells me. “It’s very much inspired by other gambling games that have come out in the past few years and reductio ad absurdum — making the smallest, most absurd version.” There isn’t supposed to be a way to cheat the randomness inherent in the game. “I think the line that people latch onto is ‘There is no way to beat these odds. There is only time,’” says Flowers. “I was wrong.”

Although Flowers says she didn’t expect speedruns to take off, she thinks runners get her design philosophy. “I think everybody in that community is doing it because they know that it’s really funny to speedrun this game in particular, because you’re literally just rawdogging random chance.” It’s a sentiment echoed to me by most of the runners I spoke to who talked about how they first got into the game. “There is just something very silly about speedrunning coin flipping and without some silliness life would be very boring,” says Laika.

There are other speedrunning categories. The game actually has five endings. When you’ve flipped nine heads, it randomly decides whether you’d normally flip heads again using the percentage chance you’re currently at. Then, if so, it decides which ending you’ll get. The leaderboard for the “All Endings” category has a single entry, a seven-hour run by enbyzee.

Image: Heather Flowers

“[It] nearly broke me,” she says. “I’ve never been mentally battered by a speedrun as much as [that one]. Getting multiple streaks of nine heads in a row only to have tails come up on the 10th. Getting multiple endings I already had when I just needed the last unique ending to finish the run. It was absolutely brutal.” Although she’s done long speedruns before, they always have a lot going on, keeping things fresh and interesting. Unfair Flips does not. “I pressed the spacebar over 20,000 times during that run.”

After five hours and four unique endings playing alone, enbyzee took a quick break, considered quitting, and decided to continue on stream instead. A little over 90 minutes later she got the last ending she needed. “I wanted to scream and cry when it happened. My sister actually called me and told me off for being too loud but I didn’t care because it was over.”

“I pressed the spacebar over 20,000 times during that run.”

Ravspect adds that “hitting those 10 heads feels just as amazing on your first playthrough as it does on your 100th.” The community comes together in search of that feeling on Flippin’ Fridays. Every other week, “we connect, share our passion for this weird little speedrun, and just have a good time,” says Laika. One recent Friday, MsTruffles was one of the runners trying to improve her personal best while streaming to the community. In her first-ever session running the game, she set the then-world record at eight minutes and 20 seconds, the first sub-10-minute run. Since then, “I still haven’t been lucky enough to improve my time, even after about a hundred attempts,” she says.

She also adds that Flippin’ Fridays are a good opportunity to bring in new runners. “This is such an accessible game to speedrun because you don’t need to learn difficult tricks, practice hard glitches, or remember complicated routing,” says Laika. “You just flip.”

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• Jay Castello