I’ve been playing Hay Day on and off for years now. For most of that time, I thought of it as just a cozy, slow-paced farming game. My focus was always on expanding my barn, decorating my little farm, and slowly collecting all the cute animals. But after reading the “Designing Chance” piece and the article on Live Service games, I started looking at Hay Day a little differently. It turns out, buried underneath all the flowers and cows, is a system that quietly borrows a lot from casino probability design.
The randomness is honestly everywhere once you start noticing it. Take the Wheel of Fortune. I’ve probably spun this thing hundreds of times, just as a daily routine. There’s always this moment of hope when you’re watching the wheel slow down—maybe I’ll finally land on the jackpot, or at least get something useful like a saw. But nine times out of ten, it’s just another food item or random decorations. What hit me after doing the readings is how this mechanic works almost exactly like a slot machine. The “big” prizes are right there, super visible, but the odds of getting them are basically invisible. If you want to spin again, you pay with diamonds or watch an ad. It’s basically designed to make you want to try “just one more time,” even if you know it’s not likely to work out.
The randomness doesn’t stop there. In the second image, you can see the “Bonus!” popup from when I got a screw out of collecting from my pigs. These random item drops are pretty much the only way to expand your barn or silo. Sometimes you get lucky and collect three in a row, but more often than not, you’ll end up stuck waiting (or grinding) for days to get the one piece you need. I always thought of it as just “bad luck,” but after reading about machine probability design, I see now how intentional it is. The slow drip of progress is meant to make those rare rewards feel exciting, but it also pushes you toward spending diamonds to speed things up. And then there are mechanics like the Fuel Spin and even fishing. The Fuel Spin is literally another random wheel, only this time you’re spinning for a resource needed to play another part of the game. If you’re unlucky, your progress in the Valley stalls out—unless, of course, you want to spend more diamonds for extra spins. Even fishing in Hay Day, which seems skill-based on the surface, is partly a lottery. Sometimes you catch what you need, sometimes you don’t, and there’s no way to control it.
After paying more attention this week, it also became obvious how players talk about luck in Hay Day. People in forums (and honestly, me too) say things like “I have the worst luck with planks,” or “finally got a saw, thank goodness.” There’s almost a superstition to it, like if you just keep playing, your luck will eventually turn around. Some players try to “game” the randomness, but most of it is totally out of your control.Tying this back to the readings, especially the one on live service games, it’s clear how these chance-based mechanics keep players coming back. There’s always one more thing you could do—one more spin, one more harvest, one more bonus to hope for. The game doesn’t tell you the odds, and a lot of the time, it puts up little roadblocks that can only be skipped with premium currency. On the surface, it feels fair and casual, but underneath, the design is doing a lot of heavy lifting to keep players just on the edge of frustration (and maybe, spending).
Thinking about the ethics of this, I don’t think randomness in games is automatically bad. There’s definitely a thrill to hoping for a rare drop, and sometimes that’s what keeps things interesting. But the problem is when those random systems are tied to money, hidden probabilities, and core progression. When you’re basically forced to wait or pay, and you never know what your odds actually are, it starts to feel less like a game and more like a slot machine wearing a farm costume. It’s especially tricky with games like Hay Day, which are super accessible and played by a lot of kids.
So, after years of playing, I see Hay Day in a new light. The bright visuals and chill soundtrack are still there, but so are all these little moments where the game is quietly asking me to gamble—my time, my attention, and sometimes my money—on a spin of the wheel. It’s a game that rewards patience, but also really wants you to get impatient and spend. The result is a system that’s fun and addictive, but in a way that feels a lot more engineered than I ever realized.
