I got The Wretched and The Last Librarian in the Equality Bundle, and while I didn't have time to properly play through the games, they still deeply interested me; this included the mechanics of the jenga set and cards, because I am an incredibly odd person. I wrote a quick Java program to check the actual odds of victory. I figure this information might be interesting to anyone who already played a Wretched and Alone game, and especially to the creators, but will probably make the experience worse for those who have not played, so I'm hiding it behind this link. Again, please don't read through this if you haven't experienced a W&A game. This paste was written based off of The Wretched specifically, but almost all of the W&A games are identical as far as I can tell (mechanically, that is - you're really paying for the rest of the experience anyway).

If Chris or another creator doesn't want this information out there, I'll delete it.

e: It seems Balou85 made a similar (probably better) program, but I'm leaving this up because it's a top-level post and his is hidden in a comment.

I don't recall the precise number for probability of winning (and Twitter chat doesn't have search) but your simulation is kind of in line with our expectations. We didn't put anything on probability into the SRD, but perhaps we could.

It's also worth noting that there some W&A games that have toyed with making things easier and creating more winnable experiences as there are definitely experiences that make sense within W&A that have more positive outcomes.

We do already have some plans for a 2.0 SRD that addresses a few things about the current version, but those plans haven't been able to move forward quite as quickly as we would have liked.

As Matt said above - the astronomically low probability of "winning" is a feature of The Wretched, because the game isn't designed for you to "win". It's about telling a story of perseverance in the face of certain death, and clinging on to false hope. That's why I spelled out in the Debrief section that the rules of The Wretched lied to you - even though the game promises an escape with the Ace of Hearts, it was never actually going to happen.

Obviously this doesn't work for everybody, and some games in the jam are designed for you to be able to win them. That's great, and I'm really happy to see people playing with the system and changing it to do what they want it to do. We're also doing some work on the SRD to deal with the issue of the rules as an unreliable narrator, because this is problematic for people with specific kinds of trauma that I didn't consider when writing the original game. As soon as that work is done we'll be updating the SRD and I'll be updating The Wretched as well.

Hi! I've had some experience over the past six months with implementing simulation-stuff. I would love to have a look at your code, if you're willing to share.

I'm very aware that the game is supposed to be difficult (perhaps the wrong term; there is no difficulty in rolling dice and drawing cards in the correct number and order, only luck), and that even the option to make the game "easier" probably intentionally barely matters - the point of this post was more to define just how unlikely it is, because I (and I'm assuming a few other people on here) am the kind of person to overthink systems like this if I don't actually define them. I definitely appreciate what you're trying to do with this SRD; it's not something that's easy to do outside of a video game format, and outside of play-until-death sandboxes even those usually have somewhat happier endings. I haven't been reading the Twitter conversations, but I would assume that Condition 2 being a complete farce was more of an issue than Condition 1 being unlikely? If that's the case then this post probably can't help fix that anyway (which is obviously the most important one), though it may be useful for gamemakers so they can decide just how unlikely they want victory to be.

Umbra: The simulator code can be found here, but I'd like to restate that this was basically just a rushed way to figure these numbers - it's terrible coding by any standard, cobbled together from half-remembered Java lessons and reused code from a course two years ago. No user-input, any parameter change is accomplished by changing the starting variables for each trial. Deck generation code was outright stolen from one of the first few google results for "java deck code."

Bonus: rolling for escape after every single card (not day) skyrockets the full-random win chance to about 1/20. Starting with the Ace of Hearts raises this to 1/10, and with the Ace of Diamonds as well, about 1/2.

e: Realized my code looks for "King of Aces" so the death condition wasn't properly being checked for. Death odds are probably fairly higher.