How much of Settlers of Catan is Luck?

How much of Settlers of Catan is Luck?(malcolmong.com)

27 points by malcolmong 14 years ago | 44 comments

gte910h 14 years ago |

If you like Catan, try these games:

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/35677/le-havre <= economic engine building game set in a costal french port

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/43111/chaos-in-the-old-wo... <= Point scoring game where doing a faction specific objective gets yours further ahead. Very balanced, but via active player action (like refusing to trade with a guy at 8-9 points in Catan)

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/68448/7-wonders <= civ building game with small military elements

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/34635/stone-age <= stone age building/civ game

Yspahan http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/22345/yspahan <= point scoring game about running shops in an "idealized" arabian bazar.

scarmig 14 years ago |

Luck is a factor, but interpersonal dynamics and alliances are most important, in my experience.

How to win: always be a moderate second while limiting the routes for first to win, concurrently reserve at least two separate routes to victory for yourself, and don't let the game get too lopsided. Then as the end draws near, finish it in a turn.

It would be interesting to have a Catan-AI competition. Does the Catan server allow bots?

SomeCallMeTim 14 years ago |

What bugs me about Settlers isn't that it's got too much luck, it's that I can pretty much tell who is going to win (or at least one of two) based on the initial settlement placement. Or at least who's going to lose. And it's pretty much completely no fun to play a game where the result is preordained that you'll lose.

Speaking of settlement placement: There aren't enough rolls in a game of Catan for the distribution of rolls to come out as you'd expect them. I've played a game where more 12s were rolled than 6s (though OMG were there a lot of 8s). It's not bad dice -- it's just the normal result of a "random" distribution when you're not generating that many results.

So a HUGE part of the strategy that the article misses is to maximize your DISTRIBUTION of numbers. I don't care if there's an 8/9/10 combo available for your second settlement; if you already have 8 & 9, you're much better off with a 3/4/5 combo (assuming you have none of those). Otherwise you're stuck with a feast or famine situation; sure you might be lucky, but you might instead be resource-starved for large parts of the game.

I actually picked up a "Deck of Dice" [1] to use with Catan, which is 36 cards that have a regular distribution of results of rolling two dice, but haven't given it a try yet to see if it makes Catan feel different. It seems like it might play a lot different; I really should give that a try... :)

[1] http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5460/the-deck-of-dice

Someone 14 years ago | |

I disagree. Going for the low-variance option is a good idea if you do not want to lose, but not one if you want to win.

Consider a game where one player gets two items for every roll above 7, another two items for every roll below 7, and a third one item for every roll that is not 7. With any not perfectly even distribution of rolls, one of the first two players will have the highest production, and the other of the two the lowest. There is no set of throws that will give the last player the most produce.

anthonyb 14 years ago | | |

Except that rolling high vs. low vs. a balance of both all have equal probabilities.

anthonyb 14 years ago | |

I find that it's not so much a balanced distribution of numbers, but that you don't have to cash in 4 for 1 for a resource that you need.

Also, you don't need a deck of dice - just draw on an old pack of cards with a permanent marker :)

SomeCallMeTim 14 years ago | | |

Ports are good, sure. I'm not saying it's the ONLY strategy. Just that it's a major bit of strategy that happens before the game even starts. You can certainly choose a spot near a port at the start, though I wouldn't recommend putting an initial settlement on a port. You need the most resource production you can manage early on.

Already got the deck of dice. I don't actually have any extra old packs of cards -- I have a couple, but I'm not a big card game player. Well, I used to play Magic, but writing on Magic cards just seems wrong. ;)

JeffJenkins 14 years ago |

I've played a lot of games of Catan against the computer on the Xbox 360, which gives stats, and I found that is almost all cases the player who had the most resources (produced - lost/stolen) won. To some extent this makes sense since a better economy will produce more resources, but it didn't seem to matter what the resources were or whether they were used directly or 4-crunched into something else.

What I took from that is if you're choosing settlement spots or robber targets you'll do pretty well just maximizing the number of resources you produce or block (which, for the robber, means multiplying the number of pips by the number of resource gained if the number rolls)

nimblegorilla 14 years ago | |

It's true that the person with the most resources will probably win, but a key factor getting to that point is ability to best ramp up production to produce those resources.

Early in the game it is important to try to get that next settlement or city. If you can place a robber to block important sheep or whatever is in short supply then that can be better than just blocking a high number of pips. When placing a settlement sometimes it is better to spread out rather than circling around one hex with high pips (and being vulnerable to a robber knocking out your entire production chain).

Another aspect of placing the robber on an opponent's "high pip" space is that they become motivated to play soldiers and possibly move the robber to your own high pip space. If you instead place the robber on a ho-hum tile you might not block as many potential resources, but the robber will stay away from your tiles for a longer period.

bodo_leer 14 years ago | |

That the player with the most resources wins seems obvious to me, because you have to buy all wining points yourself.(Cities, Towns, tech cards, streets, etc) There is no other way.

But you have a bunch of different strategies to get the most resources.

Trading is a pretty big aspect in a real Settlers game and the value of your resources depends on the overall resource output of the game field. E.g. When your the the only one controlling a iron field, it becomes more valuable for the others.

biot 14 years ago |

Meta-question: board games like chess and go are entirely based upon skill, but are there board games similar to Monopoly or Catan where you have the board, pieces, cards that grant abilities, etc. which are based entirely upon skill?

You'd have to eliminate dice entirely and make movement solely the choice of the player, within a defined set of rules. Cards wouldn't come up randomly but would be earned based on objective criteria. Conflicts for position/status/etc. need to be settled objectively as well.

I can think of a number of computer games which might fit the criteria, but I'm unaware of what's out there in the physical board game world.

gte910h 14 years ago |

Settlers of Catan has piles of luck compared to many other games that only get uncertainty from the chaos of a bunch of other players moves.

The die rolls, especially using the wooden dice that come with the game, are very likely to come out very biased and not very even for a given game, as well as the very rare powerful cards buried in a sea of knights in the dev card deck.

Luck is not bad. Luck is merely a thing you can put in a game or not, just like 'it is played on a field' or 'do you wager real money on the outcome'.

Games with too little luck make unskilled players unwilling to play them with skilled players (such as chess).

Does Catan have more luck than many other designer/german board games? More so than many ones originally published in Europe and a few of the US ones (Princes of Florence, Power Grid, Automobile, Chaos in the Old World all have far less luck), but many other games, especially "Classic" board games, have far more luck, such as Diplomacy (chaos based uncertainty is still something uncertain), Monopoly, Scrabble, and Risk.

If you gasp at catan having lots of luck, think of this tidbit: When's the last time you have seen people who know how to play texas holdem play straight up 5-card draw with no wilds? Other than a brief interlude, probably not often: The game is too skill based. Whereas the much closer odds for texas holdem have MANY people willing to play a round, even drop 10k play against the pros in the WSOP.

If you're looking for more games in the vein of Catan, check out this list (some good wargames in there as well, read the description before buying):

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame

ruedaminute 14 years ago |

If you play Cities and Knights (Catan expansion), the contribution of luck to a victory decreases by quite a bit, methinks. The game is much longer (play to 13 or more points) and involves a heck of a lot more strategy. There are more ways to win. You can also play with cards instead of dice (or like me, build a quick web-based cards prototype because I was too lazy to go physically buy them)

deweller 14 years ago |

Here's a quote from Klaus Teuber, the designer of Catan, that speaks to his philosophy of luck in games:

"When I play a game, I play intuitively. I don't like games where you have to think too much, where luck plays no part and the better player always wins. Chance makes things more exciting. If I know exactly what is going to happen tomorrow, things get boring. It's the same in a game. I prefer it that way."

WadeF 14 years ago |

What makes Settlers fun is that there is a good deal of randomness (luck), but you can play the game in such a way that you more often than not luck is on your side.

For instance, having access to all five resources leaves you in a better position for trading and buying, having diversity of numbers guarantees more often than not you'll collect a card, and having access to ports means you can have favorable trading.

There's also a good deal of diplomacy involved, because if someone decides to shut down your resources with the robber or refuses to trade with you because of some ribbing you can really limit your chances to win.

nekojima 14 years ago |

For those interested in playing Settlers of Catan, but don't have the game or enough players handy, it is available on BSW, a German site that also has an English interface. The quality of play is generally quite high & competitive, for this game and many of the others on the site.

http://brettspielwelt.de/Spiele/Siedler/

There are also a number of the other card/boardgames mentioned in the rest of this discussion which are available on BSW.

ktrgardiner 14 years ago |

Short answer: a fair amount. Anecdotal story: The one time i played, having never even heard of the game before, I learned as I went along and ended up winning. I'd say my final few plays were the only ones based more upon strategy and less upon "Is this a fair play? Yes? Well then here's my play." So a good deal of luck is involved because a novice can't beat pros in a game based entirely upon skill.

Someone 14 years ago | |

How much of it is luck depends heavily on where you place the plateau of what "everybody knows".

For example, it is a skill to use the heuristic that one should not place the robber near one's own towns, or that one should try and build additional towns and roads. If that is considered something that not everybody knows, the skill factor likely is over 50%.

swang 14 years ago | |

You came to your conclusion based off a sample size of 1 from an anecdotal story...

markyc 14 years ago | |

apart from chess, I don't know of other games based entirely upon skill :)

starwed 14 years ago | | |

Chess/Go/Checkers are one category of game where luck plays no part, but not the only one. The thing they all have in common are 2 players and perfect information.

Then there are games like Stratego, which have no 'luck' but require you to make decisions based on imperfect information.

And games like Diplomacy, with no random element but a social dynamic. I'd assert that this game has no 'luck', but someone else up thread defines luck a bit differently and says that it does. :)

dalke 14 years ago | | |

tic-tac-toe and go also require as much luck as chess.

scarmig 14 years ago | | |

Go =)

LogicHoleFlaw 14 years ago |

I find that, in Settlers of Catan, if you're winning - it's skill. It's only luck when you're losing ;)

anthonyb 14 years ago |

If the luck element bothers you, just use a deck of 36 cards, numbered from 2-12: 1x2, 2x3, 3x4, etc. (Either draw your own on a deck of cards or use two decks of playing cards). Shuffle, and deal from the top instead of a dice roll. When the deck is exhausted, reshuffle.

twiceaday 14 years ago |

How much of it is your friends teaming up to help somebody else win just to make you lose?

jules 14 years ago | |

It can be argued that making sure that you're not that losing player is a skill as well. There is a game called Family Business that is almost entirely based on this concept. Each player has a gang of mobsters, and on each turn you get action cards. The game revolves around the "hit list". You can put enemy mobsters on the hit list with action cards. When there are 6 or more mobsters on the hit list, a "mob war" starts, and on each turn the topmost mobster on the hit list is killed. The mob war continues until the hit list is empty. There are also action cards for removing a mobster from the hit list, instantly killing an enemy mobster, blocking a card that puts a mobster on the hit list, etc. The key to winning this game is convincing your friends to collectively screw over another friend, and to convince them that it is a bad idea to kill your mobsters by using the right tit-for-tat strategy and using intimidation and bluffing about which action cards you have to take revenge.

Similar strategies can work for Settlers of Catan as well. When a player does something bad like block you with a road and you're playing at a disadvantage, then you can sacrifice this game for scaremongering and do everything in your power to make the player that did it lose (block him with roads and always use the robber on him). Next game people will be more careful ;)

anthonyb 14 years ago |

plug: my Settlers of Catan strategy guide: http://blog.oarsum.com/post/263227690/the-weasel-guide-to-se...

Might come in handy for some...