[HN Gopher] How to cheat at settlers by loading the dice (2017)
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How to cheat at settlers by loading the dice (2017)
Author : jxmorris12
Score : 66 points
Date : 2025-05-22 18:25 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (izbicki.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (izbicki.me)
| n2d4 wrote:
| An interesting way to spice up any board game is to openly use
| loaded dice, but without any player knowing which numbers it
| favors. This adds a layer of strategy to whatever game you're
| playing, although it loses its appeal when people start taking
| out their calculators.
| vunderba wrote:
| Tangentially related but one of the reasons casinos use
| translucent dice is to make it easier to perform visual
| inspections to check for injected weights under the pips, etc.
| ultimafan wrote:
| Interesting to think about- would it really matter if the
| casino was loading their dice? Craps allows you to bet
| for/against almost every possible bet and you usually have
| people playing pass/don't pass and come/don't come on the same
| table. Offering weighted dice to screw some players out of
| their money is probably going to result in the other players
| making just as much if not more back. Superstitious players
| absolutely would notice a "streak" and switch their bets to
| match it, and the casino isn't going to be able to swap/take
| away the dice without killing the vibe and making those same
| players cash out.
|
| Feels like it's in their best interest to have a "fair" game
| where they skim some percentage of odds off the top.
| hnfong wrote:
| Cheaters might be able to sneak in some loaded dice, so the
| dice being easy to inspect is good for the house.
| praptak wrote:
| It doesn't hurt for them to make it easier for the more
| paranoid players to inspect stuff.
|
| Also there's the scenario of an employee colluding with a
| player.
| thatnerd wrote:
| For a casino? In practice, yes, fair games are perfectly
| consistent with greedily skimming a game, and fair games draw
| gamblers.
|
| That said, when organized crime gets involved, somebody
| always thinks "if I rig this, I'll do EVEN BETTER!" Maybe
| they're a corrupt employee skimming _from_ the house, maybe
| they 're a loyal employee skimming _for_ the house, but
| unless you have something like the Nevada Gaming Control
| Board forcing fairness on them, you basically never get it.
| At least, from what I 've read on the subject. Source: I've
| read some books on card counting & otherwise beating the odds
| in casinos, and this my vague memory.
|
| And it's ironic that the house _wants_ to rig games, because
| a biased game means a mathematically savvy individual can go
| in and _calculate_ how results differ from "fair" games, and
| can then skim some profits for themselves if the bias is
| larger than the house advantage.
| andrewla wrote:
| A lot of money in craps gets bet on odds that are close to
| even-money. It's hard, I think, to weight dice so that the
| house would increase their take by a measurable amount.
|
| A lot of the effective value of a casino is gamblers ruin --
| gamblers stop betting when they run out of money, but the
| house can't run out of money. If the game has sufficient
| variance and the players are not aware of the bias, then the
| house still wins.
| ultimafan wrote:
| It's for a reason similar to this that the only game I will
| play in casinos is craps.
|
| It's not hard to imagine ways to get cheated out of a
| "fair" bet in card games, roulette, slots, etc. whether
| it's a mechanical cheat, sleight of hand, adjustment of
| odds, or whatever. Not saying it happens or is even a
| common occurrence but it's very easy to imagine ways it
| COULD happen or has happened in the past that are
| impossible for the player to detect.
|
| Craps is the only game it feels like to me where provided
| the payout odds used are the same standard you see
| everywhere and the dice aren't metallic there is virtually
| no way to cheat the player/a bet in a way that wouldn't
| also benefit another player/another bet.
| misja111 wrote:
| FYI if you are suspicious that your opponent is cheating, it's
| easy to verify if dice are loaded or not: drop them in a glass of
| water a couple of times. If every time the same side ends upwards
| they are loaded.
| nartho wrote:
| Saturate the cup of water with salt so the dice float, then
| just roll the dice in the water
| yellowapple wrote:
| Is soaking the dice even necessary?
|
| A naively constructed die - i.e. a perfect cube, but with pips
| dug out for each face - will already bias in favor of 6 rolls and
| away from 1 rolls simply because six pips require removing more
| material (and therefore mass) than one pip. Likewise with 5/2 and
| 4/3. The "precision" dice used in e.g. casinos address this by
| filling in the pips with material exactly as dense as the die's
| base material; the injection-molded dice in most board games (let
| alone wooden dice) obviously ain't constructed with that level of
| care.
|
| This is also part of the reason why some dice games -
| particularly those typically played with cheap dice - deem 1 to
| be more valuable than 6 (example: Farkle) or require at least one
| 1 roll to win (example: 1-4-24). Or they'll require some number
| of high dice to make the game ever-so-slightly less brutal
| (example: Ship-Captain-Crew).
| GavinMcG wrote:
| Is the bias from having more or fewer pips just as strong as
| the bias introduced by the water?
| yellowapple wrote:
| Depends on a lot of variables, I'd think:
|
| - How dense is the wood?
|
| - How much wood does each pip remove?
|
| - How much water does the wood absorb per unit of volume?
|
| - Are any capillary effects at play transferring absorbed
| water into the rest of the die?
|
| - Is it better to soak the 6 side to take advantage of more
| surface area? Or the 1 side to take advantage of more
| soakable volume?
|
| - Is the wood even uniformly dense to begin with?
| burch45 wrote:
| Yes. Very funny for the author to spend a lot of time talking
| about null hypothesis testing, but not actually running a
| control experiment to test the null hypothesis that his dice
| are actually different from the stock dice.
| hinkley wrote:
| I remember a retired engineer was selling perfectly balanced
| dice intended for RPG players. RPG players are going to
| gravitate toward the most unfair dice they perceive in their
| set. I appreciate his enthusiasm but he's only going to sell
| those dice to competitions and maybe GMs.
|
| I think that's one of the reasons GMs sometimes make a high
| roll from the player into a punishment. Especially by asking
| for the roll first and telling what they were looking for
| after. It's a way to balance out the consequences of
| unintentionally loaded dice.
| vkou wrote:
| "20? Your axe cleaves straight through through the orc,
| decapitating him, and reducing the pillar behind him to
| rubble!"
|
| "You should probably know that this was a load-bearing
| pillar."
| gigaflop wrote:
| You reminded me, and I think I have some, or at least some
| variety of these as a set of 10d6. Metal, and the pips are
| precisely machined to such depths where they're perfectly
| balanced. Nice bronzed finish, with black pips.
|
| Also, if someone is obviously cheating with a loaded die at
| an RPG game, they're not the kind of player that should be
| invited back. Most characters have ways of increasing their
| modifiers to rolls that matter most to them (My current
| ranger is 1d20 +16 for Perception), and having high-enough
| base numbers can mean that anything other than a natural 1 is
| usually _some_ kind of success.
| hinkley wrote:
| I would like to have Laura Bailey's dice checked by an
| independent party for instance. Her substantial
| superstitions about good vs bad dice are an example of what
| I'm talking about above. Lucky dice don't have to be
| intentional cheating, but people who have lucky dice are
| likely cheating in plain sight.
| geoffpado wrote:
| It looks in the photo at the bottom like that the pips are
| painted on, not dug out. While that might bias things slightly,
| I'd expect that the amount of paint used is minimal.
| n2d4 wrote:
| Most commonly, the pips are slightly dug out, then paint is
| put into the holes.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This might be a better cheat for... I dunno, maybe risk? Or
| monopoly?
|
| In settlers, trade is always important... getting an early lead
| can get you ganged up on. At least in my experience, the best way
| to win is to look like you are in second place, line things up
| (get close to some crucial port for example) and then rocket past
| the Designated Villain only when doing so will get you a really
| solid lead.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Just lay low with slightly larger hands early on. You can
| afford this since your total resource production needed to win
| isn't as dependent on an early settlement or city. Maybe let
| yourself get hosed by the robber once to build sympathy. With
| more extreme number hexes rolling more consistently, your card
| accumulation will be less spiky, so you should have a smoother
| endgame even if others won't trade.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| I'm not sure how much I trusted the data, surely the water would
| have been dried over a week
| zaik wrote:
| > Surprisingly, we'll prove that standard scientific tests are
| not powerful enough to determine that the dice are unfair while
| playing a game.
|
| This, or the process of loading the dice was simply not very
| effective.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| I remember somewhere, might have been the Catan Android app, had
| an option to use cards instead of dice. The cards had all the
| combinations so no number could come up more often than it
| should. Never got to play it that way but it looks like an
| interesting solution to people complaining certain numbers come
| up too often.
| cde-v wrote:
| That option existed for the physical game as well, just as a
| separate purchase. I do not see it for sale anymore anywhere
| which is weird.
| bell-cot wrote:
| With a deck or few of regular playing cards, not using the
| 7's through kings, it'd be easily enough to get the same
| effect.
| cde-v wrote:
| Good point, hadn't thought about that. Probably why they
| don't sell it anymore.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| The one I was talking about would be cards from 2 to 12
| representing both dice, one card for 2 and 12, two cards
| for 3 and 11, and so on. So you would need six cards to
| represent 7, but your point still prevails.
| mechanicum wrote:
| They bundled it into the _Traders & Barbarians_ expansion.
| vunderba wrote:
| Interesting - kind of reminds me of "bag randomization" that
| some versions of Tetris use. Bag is filled with an equal
| distribution of all possible pieces and dealt randomly until
| empty at which point the pieces are placed back in the bag and
| the process is started all over again.
| hinkley wrote:
| I won a Settlers game against my boss who never invited me again.
| I don't know what was wrong with his dice but we saw 6's about
| three times as often as 8's which makes me think one of the dice
| was borked and was rolling unevenly. I was in the picking
| rotation in a way where I ended up with several 6's and I just
| steamrolled the entire game.
| xivzgrev wrote:
| Settlers brings out my angry side. I had a period of playing 1 on
| 1 with my wife, and she kept winning. That wasn't the frustrating
| part - what I didn't like was how early leads compound into
| larger leads as the game rolls on. So you know you are going to
| lose, and you just keep losing more. Much like Monopoly.
|
| At least with games like chess, you might be down but you still
| have some hope of coming back with some maneuvering.
|
| Maybe what I didn't like was the parallels with life. There's not
| usually a rabbit in the hat to come out on top, the rich just get
| richer.
| ben7799 wrote:
| I never played enough Settlers to pick up on this but I totally
| get it with Monopoly, and I feel like this is bad game design
| when it happens.
|
| Monopoly feels like the game might take 4 hours but you know 20
| minutes in that you're hopelessly behind and cannot come back.
| Then it's just 3 hours and 40 minutes of torture.
|
| If you're doomed to lose the game should be over quick.
| soperj wrote:
| > If you're doomed to lose the game should be over quick.
|
| I think most people are in this situation in life, but would
| disagree with you. The game itself was intended as an
| educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of
| concentrating land in private monopolies, hard to get the
| message when it's over quickly.
| praptak wrote:
| Yes, this design was intentional. Moreover, Monopoly as we
| know it today was intended to be one of two rulesets, the
| sucky one.
|
| The good one was intended to demonstrate a better
| alternative.
| nothrabannosir wrote:
| In the case of Monopoly that feeling is the point of the
| game:
|
| _> The history of Monopoly can be traced back to 1903,[1][8]
| when American anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie created a game
| called The Landlord 's Game that she hoped would explain the
| single-tax theory of Henry George as laid out in his book
| Progress and Poverty. It was intended as an educational tool
| to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in
| private monopolies. She took out a patent in 1904. Her game
| was self-published beginning in 1906.[9][10]_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Monopoly feels like the game might take 4 hours
|
| For what it's worth, if you play Monopoly _by the actual
| rules_ , and you don't act stupidly stingy on your trade
| offers, a 4-player game of Monopoly shouldn't take more than
| 30-45 minutes.
|
| The problem is, people of course don't like losing, and
| everybody loves a comeback story. So people play with house
| rules that constantly inject extra money into the game, which
| prolongs the game's purpose: For all the wealth to
| consolidate to a single player.
|
| House rules in Monopoly are so common that a lot of people
| don't even realize they're playing house rules!
|
| Do you give money for landing on Free Parking? You're playing
| a house rule.
|
| Do you give $400 instead of $200 for LANDING on Go? You're
| playing a house rule.
|
| Do you allow purchasing Hotels when there aren't enough
| houses? Do you allow building to not be even? Do you use some
| sort of object to act like a hotel because the game only
| comes with 12 hotels in the box? You're playing house rules.
| The fact there are only 12 hotels and 32 houses was a
| deliberate design choice to force players to trade and allow
| one player to horde all the houses and hotels.
|
| You can't mortgage properties that have buildings on them.
| You must sell the buildings first, and you only get half of
| what you paid for them from the bank. When you unmortage, you
| have to pay an extra 10% fee. You don't collect rent on
| mortgaged properties. If you play any differently, you're
| playing a house rule.
|
| Rolling doubles 3 times sends you to jail. That's actually
| NOT a house rule!
|
| Speaking of jail, you DO still collect rent while in it! This
| means that deliberately staying in jail can actually be a
| strategic move if another player is possibly about to land on
| your dark Green properties (Baltic, North Carolina,
| Pennsylvania) while your opponent owns the Oranges, which
| you're likely to land on immediately after leaving jail.
|
| Don't get me wrong, Monopoly is a shitty game for many
| reasons, but "Games take 2+ hours" is not one of them unless
| you're playing it wrong.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| It's designed better for 4 players. In that case, 3 other
| players directing all 7 robbers and knight robbers to the clear
| lead really acts as a negative feedback loop to counter any
| snowball. That's not nearly as possible from just 1 behind
| player
| mgh2 wrote:
| Not exactly a parallel with monopoly, which I agree, is like
| life, where early advantages results in the rich getting
| richer, the injustice makes it boring and frustrating.
|
| In Settlers there are actually strategies and "luck" is more
| evenly distributed. You can vary your approach or strategy -
| ex: by focusing on upgrading to cities as early as possible to
| give you 2x advantage, regardless of starting locations.
|
| Parallel to life: birth location determines most of luck in
| life (opportunities, income, connections, friends), but you can
| increase this advantage by moving, within certain constraints
| (education, visa, marriage, etc.). Nevertheless, _luck is
| certainly the most important factor_.
|
| In a better and not broken world, laws (rules of the game) will
| try to avoid the 1st and reflect the later. Ex: antitrust,
| immigration, affirmative action, etc.
| GeneralMayhem wrote:
| Settlers might have _less_ of a snowball effect than
| Monopoly, but it 's definitely there. Pretty much any
| resource-gathering game is going to have it. If your resource
| numbers get rolled early on, you get to be the first one to
| build a city or a third settlement. Then your income is
| higher, so you'll get to the 4th point faster. And so on.
|
| Like another commentor said, the intended fix for this in
| Settlers is social dynamics: the leader is going to be
| blocked from the best settling spots, isn't going to get
| favorable trade deals, and is going to get hammered by the
| robber. The key strategic gameplay in Settlers is not about
| profit maximization (that's pretty easy to do), it's about
| minimizing any appearance that you're a threat until it's too
| late to do anything about it. If players never collaborate to
| take down the leader, then early gains can definitely beget
| later gains.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I think that might be a function of playing 1 on 1. At some
| point (when settlers was still only popular in Germany), we (4
| player game) played with one of my best friends flatmates who
| was at the time winning a lot of the tournaments in Germany. He
| would consistently whoop our butts no matter how the game
| started (and all others of us were pretty big board gamers as
| well). It was amazing to see how little he relied on chance,
| his dominance became even more apparent once we used the cities
| and knights extension.
| hibikir wrote:
| Settlers is a poor 2 player game: It's really designed for
| more. Then balance comes form bashing the leader mechanisms:
| Unfavorable trades, robber uses always hitting them and so on.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Yeah I'm so sick of getting bashed haha
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Settlers of Catan explicitly requires 3 players, in fact. I'm
| not terribly surprised it doesn't work great with 2.
| mzs wrote:
| You can apply The Settlers of Zarahemla setup and trading
| rules to Catan (while avoiding the additional mechanics in
| Zarahemla) to create a 2-player Catan. It does have the
| problem xivzgrev mentioned if you do not each secretly
| adopt different atypical strategies each game.
| snarf21 wrote:
| We are living in the renaissance of board game design right
| now. Settlers is a step forward from Monopoly but is still just
| a roll-and-do and it also suffers horribly from king making and
| other design problems. There are so many amazing board games
| out there right now for every skill level and taste.
| ungreased0675 wrote:
| Would you recommend a few that are beginner friendly and
| available at my local board game shop?
| daedrdev wrote:
| "Dune: Imperium" for a more competitive and strategic game
| (there are several board games for dune but they only share
| the theme, don't get confused)
|
| Wingspan if you don't want to be aggressive against other
| players
|
| Cascadia for shorter game that supports low player counts
|
| Azul is another shorter game
|
| The isle of cats is a personal favorite, very neat game
| about packing cats on your boat
|
| Red Rising has an excellent board game if you've ever read
| the book.
| stoneman24 wrote:
| I recently joined a board game club after many years away
| from the hobby. I'll echo the recommendations above.
| Scored wins in Azul and Loot. Played Isle of cats and
| Wingspan.
|
| Games around the 3-4 players seem to have best flow and
| pace. I may buy wyrm (sister game to wingspan) just for
| the card designs.
|
| I did play a game of Twilight Imperium for 12 hours,
| which I won. Mostly newbie's but with a host who's
| provided guidance on the rules. Great fun but perhaps
| something to work up to.
| dave333 wrote:
| Another way to look at board games and sports in general is as an
| alternative to war - settling disputes in a non-violent way and
| building social cohesion in the process. In board games there are
| no real losers and in war there are no real winners. So a win at
| all costs strategy may not be necessary.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Ever played Diplomacy? (correspondence board game)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(game)
|
| It's like Risk but you submit each round's actions in advance
| and they are resolved simultaneously, rather than turn-by-turn.
| All of the action is off the board, not on it. Coalition-
| building, intelligence gathering and managing trust--even when
| betrayal is inevitable.
|
| I learned a lot from that game.
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