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For those of us who enjoy the “Crib with Gandpa” app, have you ever noticed that the app cheats a little? Not during play, but when determining the first player. Each player draws a random card, with the lower draw dealing first. It never ties.

There have been claims that it cheats during play too, but never any proof, and the app developers at one point asserted that that is not the case.

The makers of the Dominion app deal with this too. Some players have a hard time understanding that if the hardest bot can track what cards are in every draw & discard pile, and from there can make informed decisions based on probability, to a casual observer it is indistinguishable from cheating.

Yep. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In the case of Grandpas, it would be pretty easy to record 100 or so hands of the hardest setting and see how far they fall out of the expected distribution, but I haven’t seen anyone produce that evidence.