I’m doing a bingo game with my mom and noticed we have very different boards. For example, her active minute spots range from 173 to 250ish, while mine range from 84 to 113. I feel like it makes the game unfair. Is there a way to fix this? We LOVE being able to play bingo again and love this app but it’s not as fun when someone has a much easier board.
I have recently joined and upgraded to play bingo. The first couple I created were great but now when I invite my daughter….its not a fair challenge. My goals are triple her goals and that’s just not right. She’ll have 2 miles and I’ll have 8. I left that challenge and created a new one and got the same results. It’s not right and makes it no fun. Why???
Hey @stephanie_l and @linda_l, welcome to StepSmash and thanks for reaching out!
I took a look at both of your recent activity. It looks like you’ve both been more active since starting Smash Bingo (which is awesome — congrats! 
), but @linda_l has been sustaining a higher activity level overall.
StepSmash uses your previous 7 days of activity and applies some statistical modeling to generate personalized tile goals. In @stephanie_l’s case, there’s a pattern that helps explain why your distance tiles might feel too easy: there’s a pretty wide gap between your highest and lowest distance days, and those higher-distance days are being treated as outliers and not heavily weighted in the model. That can pull your distance goals down.
If you’d like, I can share a more detailed breakdown of the data in a private group message.
Active Minutes is much more complicated, and I’ve included some more details on how they work below that will hopefully help explain what is happening there.
Why Active Minutes can differ a lot on Fitbit
It looks like you’re both using Fitbit. Fitbit’s Active Zone Minutes are based on time spent in your moderate, vigorous, and peak heart rate zones, and those zones are personalized per person using things like age and resting heart rate.
Fitbit explains it here: How Fitbit calculates heart rate zones
So two people can do the same walk at the same time and still earn very different Active Zone Minutes. Health conditions, medications, sleep, stress, and hydration can affect this too.
Fairness
Traditional step games can accidentally favor certain people (fitness level, lifestyle, tracker quirks, etc.), which can be pretty demotivating. Smash Bingo has tried to faithfully recreate Fitbit’s Get Fit Bingo: we try to normalize away those differences so you’re competing against yourself, not against someone else’s age, heart-rate quirks, medications, or which tracker they happen to use.
The goal is to meet you where you are, then nudge you forward. As you move more, your targets rise too, so the challenge stays fun and motivating over time.
1 Like
This is actually the beauty of Smash Bingo! It levels the playing field! My son runs cross country, sometimes racking up a hundred miles a week! I work a desk job and It’s a good day if I go for a walk in the morning. And we can successfully play bingo together. It really is a great design!
1 Like
Not if I don’t normally bust my butt like that. I work at home and sit all day and my daughter asked me to play with her and I’m competitive so I worked so hard to beat her. It included the weekend when she’s not mobile so it appeared as if she was a slacker. So I won two bingos and then boom my targets were tripled and completely impossible. Took the fun out of it for me and made it impossible to even compete with her. Now I’m not moving much and it was great to help me lose the weight I wanted to lose. I love the bingo just not the way it’s created. I wish their was an option when you set it up to make it even or to allow it to configure. Maybe that’s down the road at some point.
Fitbit had folks express similar frustrations with Get Fit Bingo as it worked similarly, so I’ve definitely had this on my mind since we started the company. You’re definitely not the only one who has wanted more configuration options over the years 
.
Did you have anything specific in mind? The idea I’ve had kicking around my head that I’ve liked the most is figuring out a “baseline” based on the whole group, and then having everyone compete on an identical board. It would look fair and even, but it would favor folks who have active jobs/school extracurriculars.
We could consider allowing folks to set goals directly and then, again, everyone is playing the exact same board, but that has the same issues where it feels fair and even, but it gives an advantage to the same groups it did previously.
The option to configure the boards with the groups averages (and everyone having the same boards) sounds interesting. I’d still like it to only be an option that can be toggled on when creating that specific game.
1 Like
I agree! The current mechanics would probably always be the default and anything else would be optional toggles when the game is created.
More options could allow us to make a more diverse set of public games too, rather than just Bingo Blitz.