[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 : 143 points
Date : 2025-05-22 18:25 UTC (1 days 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.
| brookst wrote:
| Probably equally fun to _tell_ people you're doing that, and
| use completely fair dice.
| 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.
| robocat wrote:
| I would guess that only playing low value games is
| another strategy against the house cheating. And you
| can't lose much.
|
| For the house or a croupier to cheat, the benefits versus
| the risks would need to be high enough (more likely in
| high value games?)
| HWR_14 wrote:
| It is in their best interest to have a fair game. The
| transparent dice are to prevent the players from cheating the
| casino, not prove it's fair to the players.
| verisimi wrote:
| Nothing to do with scruples, but I don't think casinos need
| to load dice too. They already have 'loaded the maths' and
| this is in the open - over time they win. Why act covertly in
| an underhand way, whilst also providing the opportunity for
| gamblers to test themselves against probability? You'd think
| they wouldn't want to jeopardise their market provision and
| need the belief of their consumers to maintain this.
| 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.
| brookst wrote:
| I like to believe that Klaus Teuber secretly specified dice
| biased towards 1-2-3, strictly for personal benefit in games,
| and the author's approach has obscured a much greater effect
| in that direction.
| rollcat wrote:
| Catan is played widely enough that many groups tend to
| introduce their own house rules[1]. E.g. one of my rules
| is: rolling 2 is the same as rolling 12, so these hexes are
| slightly less undesirable.
|
| I guess if this really matters, you could come up with some
| set-up rules to swap some 3s with 11s, 4s with 10s, etc, so
| that biases towards 1-2-3 are less impactful. But that
| would be painstaking and annoying. I absolutely wouldn't
| care to do that, unless we track ELO and have an evenly
| matched group, which is a bit absurd in a casual game. And
| as in any strategy game FFA, everyone will still gang up
| against the current leader (even with imperfect
| information).
|
| [1]: https://www.rollc.at/posts/2024-07-01-house-rules/
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| The author's wife could only tolerate so much.
| 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.
| ultimafan wrote:
| About the last point- I remember hearing somewhere, though it
| could be an urban legend, that that's precisely the reason
| early Dungeons & Dragons (OD&D/AD&D era) had so many
| variations within different dice roll mechanics for whether
| or not a high (or low) roll was good or bad (ie high rolls
| for your attack was good, high rolls for initiative were
| bad).
|
| If the player used the same dice for all rolls, a balance
| check against biased or loaded die was therefore built
| directly into the game, with the perk of making it very
| obvious if a player was using specific dice for specific
| rolls
| yellowapple wrote:
| Seems like the solution to that (from a cheater's
| perspective) would be to bias the dice toward the mid-range
| numbers, but I don't know enough about D20 layouts to know if
| that's feasible.
| 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.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Good point.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I just checked a cheap set of dice in my 100-games-in-1 box,
| and the 1 dot is both wider and deeper than the 6 dots on the
| 6, the dots in the 2 also seem a bit deeper than the ones on
| the 6 side. I don't have any precise instrument to measure
| them, but it could be that the mold designer accounted for the
| removed (well.. not cast) material for the dice.
| yellowapple wrote:
| That's indeed a possibility, especially with modern
| manufacturing techniques allowing sufficiently-precise molds.
| 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.
| asciimov wrote:
| The cards are interesting, they include a card to force shuffle
| the deck in order to make sure there is some randomness in the
| outcomes.
|
| Even with the forced shuffle cards, the outcomes fall too much
| in the bell curve and make the game feel sterile. Because if
| you get a flood of 5's and 6's you know a drought is soon upon
| you.
| rini17 wrote:
| Well, get creative and find some middle ground. Maybe add a
| rule that player that has no cards on hand and gets no
| resources in this turn can reshuffle.
| 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.
| c22 wrote:
| One time my buddy Mike cleaned up a game of settlers by
| focusing his entire empire around a '2' tile. We rolled snake
| eyes dozens of times during that game. We used the same dice
| every time we played (once a week for over a decade) and never
| had another game like that one.
| internet_points wrote:
| tell me you worked at meta without telling me you worked at
| meta
|
| ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43781010 )
| 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.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Monopoly's maybe the only board game I prefer playing in
| computerized form.
|
| Even the one on the NES is totally fine.
|
| Rules enforced without having to remember them, auctions
| run for you, nobody has to be the banker, no manual book-
| keeping for how much is owed where and mortgage status and
| all that.
|
| Plays so much faster and smoother than the real thing, and
| no dumb house rules making it last forever for no good
| reason.
| toast0 wrote:
| All that, and you didn't mention auctions. If you don't buy
| it from the bank at the list price, it's up for auction and
| everything should be owned pretty quick.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Yeah, I probably should have mentioned it. I _always_ buy
| property upon landing on it anyways, so auctions never
| happen.
| gowld wrote:
| Ironically, "horde all the houses" (everyone get houses) is
| the opposite of "hoard all the houses" (one person gets all
| the houses).
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Ah, hell. That would be my previous WoW addiction making
| me confuse "hoard" with "horde".
| 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.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Even with the social fix, there's usually one person
| (sometimes two!) in a four-player game who does nothing
| wrong but is basically out by the second or third time
| around the board, just hanging around to help the one or
| two other non-lead players harass the leader but with no
| viable path to victory short of an insane run of luck with
| the dice (or, if you're me, as soon you realize this has
| happened to you, you help the leader get ahead faster so
| you can move on to a better game sooner...)
| 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.
| daedrdev wrote:
| I agree on the 3-4 player idea, more players is hard
| because people have too much downtime. I enjoy and have
| played several games of Twilight Imperium but you need a
| good group who are willing to play fair even if the game
| is hopeless for themselves.
| stoneman24 wrote:
| Yes, that was a point that my twilight imperium host was
| very keen on, keeping everyone engaged in the game.
|
| Even when a player situation wasn't looking good, he took
| them aside and pointed out options for them to get back
| in the hunt for victory points.
|
| It's very easy for a player to go "rogue" and spoil the
| game for the other players.
| dapperdrake wrote:
| Space Alert (very interactive)
|
| Kind-of a board game: 7th continent
| Attrecomet wrote:
| Vlaada Chvatil games just tickle something for me. Space
| Alert is hugely fun, probably best due to the chaos and
| also the fact that at least we can see the inevitable
| failure that's coming together, and nobody is the lonely
| runt, but so is Galaxy Trucker, Dungeon Lords, and as a
| quick social game, Codenames.
| peeters wrote:
| Parks for a novel game design, gorgeous artwork and tactile
| pieces. Mid complexity.
|
| Pandemic Legacy for one of the best experiences you'll have
| with the same group of friends over months (cooperative,
| play through once over 12-24 sittings). The game builds in
| complexity as you play so it starts reasonably simple
| (though the first season starts with the basic ruleset of
| Pandemic so if you've played that it's a head start but not
| necessary).
|
| Kingdomino and Cascadia for quicker terrain building games,
| I consider these fairly similar though Kingdomino is
| quicker and simpler. These I can play with anyone.
|
| Paperback if you already like word games like Scrabble etc,
| and want to dip into playing a deck building game.
|
| The Crew if you like trick-taking card games, it's a co-op
| variant to games like Bridge or Euchre.
|
| Carcassone is an oldie but goodie. Very social compared to
| many competitive games, as though it's turn based everyone
| wants to have their say for what you should do with your
| piece. Compared to e.g. Wingspan where you're largely
| ignoring/out of the loop for what's going on with everyone
| else all the time.
| roygbiv2 wrote:
| Played Pandemic Legacy over the course of probably a
| couple of years with some friends, gee it took some time
| but we got there in the end.
| frollogaston wrote:
| I played like 3 rounds of that in December 2019. Ingame,
| a novel virus with no known cure spawned in China.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Coup is a good all-rounder. One of the few games that works
| for 2 or more players. Easy, simple, and not too long. You
| can even play with a standard 52-card deck if you want.
|
| Diplomacy is a masterpiece and surprisingly beginner-
| friendly, but it's very hard to get a game going, cause
| first off you need exactly 7 people. I played online with
| friends on Backstabbr.com, and yeah it only took 5 minutes
| a day, but each game lasted 1-2 months. Or it'd be 2-4
| hours in-person.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Oh yeah, forgot to mention the 2-player game I invented
| that requires no pieces. It's based on haggling.
|
| Designate one player as the seller of an imaginary
| product and one as a potential buyer. The buyer needs a
| random secret number B from 50-100 which is the max they
| can pay, and the seller needs S from 0-50 which is the
| min they'll sell for. Use an RNG if you have one,
| otherwise you can do it yourself: Have both think of two
| random numbers from 0-100. Each says one number but not
| the other. Add the other person's number to your secret
| one, mod by 50, then add 50 if you're the buyer.
|
| Negotiate over the price until either a sale is made at P
| or someone unilaterally kills the deal. Seller wins (P -
| 50) points, buyer wins (50 - P). If the deal dies, seller
| loses S points, buyer loses (B - 50). I hope I remembered
| these right. Then switch sides and repeat.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Just One (best party game ever designed) Splendor (intro to
| "engine builder" games) Carcassonne (intro to tile laying
| games) Sushi Go (intro to "drafting" games) Scout (intro to
| climbing/shedding card games)
|
| All of these are very inexpensive and rules light and very
| approachable for beginners.
| frollogaston wrote:
| I liked Colony which is vaguely like Splendor, but it's
| not cheap. And I liked Splendor.
| frollogaston wrote:
| I think we gotta explore the card game space more. There are
| a lot of simple and addictive card games where you can get in
| the zone playing 4 hours straight.
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| That sounds like a speech someone would give on a video to
| his friends that he invited to a remote mansion to play
| lethal games with.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| That sounds fun :)
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| I slowly learned when i started playing catan, that by playing
| _against_ another player, you are virtually guaranteed to lose.
| You can only win if you cooperate with others. A valuable life
| lesson.
| asciimov wrote:
| I've played a bunch of Catan. The included wooden dice are all
| terribly biased. Not in the same way, but enough that a sets
| owner knows, at least subconsciously, what numbers their set
| favors.
|
| The best way I've found to mitigate this is to have a bag of
| assorted dice with the set. The various sizes and materials, with
| a swap out at every game, makes sure the dice bias isn't
| predictable.
|
| Regarding dice decks. I find they make the game sterile. A near
| perfect bell curve means you can anticipate number droughts or
| floods, aiding in robber strategy.
| brookst wrote:
| Expand on that last? How would you anticipate a drought or
| flood from a bell curve? These are independent rolls... you're
| not heading into gambler's fallacy territory, are you?
| toast0 wrote:
| With a dice deck, you no longer have independent rolls, and
| you can count cards. You could probably mitigate by shuffling
| early, like casinos do for blackjack.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Why would anyone even use a dice deck then, to stop people
| from complaining about the law of small numbers?
| sdwr wrote:
| > dice decks
| asciimov wrote:
| The dice deck has a perfect bell curve of dice rolls, this
| means the same number of 6's and 8's, 4's and 10's. If you go
| on a tear you can pull most of the 6's from the deck in short
| order, a flood. Making it difficult or impossible to pull
| anymore till the deck is reshuffled, the drought. Meanwhile
| the odds of pulling other cards go up.
|
| This is somewhat mitigated with cards that require you to
| reshuffle the deck. Even with shuffle cards included the
| numbers are too evenly distributed or balanced removing any
| feeling of randomness or luck from the game.
| brookst wrote:
| An sorry, I missed the deck part and thought we were
| talking about dice. Yes, a dice deck sampled without
| replacement allows card counting.
| redcobra762 wrote:
| The "criticism" of a p-value was strange to me, because it's
| never taught to be an "end all" answer to a question, rather it's
| taught as a way of determining statistical significance. Every
| stats or economic analytics course I took in college explained
| that hypothesis rejection involved critical thinking in addition
| to p-value analysis.
| rtpg wrote:
| I think so much about how Catan showed up, got really popular,
| and then more or less right after that two of its huge
| characteristics (open trading + dice rolls as the primary decider
| of things) have almost completely disappeared from modern game
| design.
|
| There's still dice rolls in some games of course, but open
| trading in particular feels like something that people really
| don't want in games anymore. And I totally get why
| volemo wrote:
| > And I totally get why
|
| Why?
|
| Catan is one of my favourite boardgames.
| rtpg wrote:
| Catan, like Monopoly (or I guess Cricket and Baseball) has am
| awkward interminable nature to it, especially at high player
| counts
|
| Long trading discussions are one component of this. The pure
| randomness of dice meaning that the internal economy can be
| all messed up for a while also plays into this
|
| There are games with more consistent runtimes that also don't
| get bogged down by people with a high chatter:play ratio.
|
| I like hanging out with people to play games but Catan is in
| that category of game where just one overly annoying person
| can just make a session totally suck.
|
| I'd rather play something like Carcassonne or some other
| modern games that involve competition and territorial
| management like El Grande where I at least have an idea of
| how long it'll take.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I also just don't think Catan is actually all that "fun"
| once you've played a couple of times.
|
| It's a decent intro board game because the mechanics aren't
| terribly complex, you don't have to manage too many pieces,
| and there's so much randomness that any given player can
| win if they're even vaguely trying.
|
| But that last bit is also its achilles heel - there's so
| much randomness that the strategy is basically ankle deep.
| It just becomes a session of "do I have friendly people at
| the table" or "can I cajole/harass people into bad trades".
|
| Neither of those are all that fun (at least to me). There
| are much better social games, and there are much better
| strategy games.
| kangda123 wrote:
| What are some other good games with open trading?
| sershe wrote:
| Western empires et al. The trading also allows limited
| bluffing (you'll get what you want but also probably smth
| negative). But it takes all day in no small part due to open
| trading.
| jakemanger wrote:
| This is absolutely brilliant. What a patient wife!
| jakemanger wrote:
| Thinking about how this can be used to my advantage the next
| time I play Catan. I play with someone that wins almost every
| time and is a real dirty deal-maker (trades with you then
| blocks your path), so it would be good to get her back.
|
| Soak the dice to shift the most common to be 5 or 9 rather than
| 6 - 8? Is that possible?
| frollogaston wrote:
| This is neat, but I was expecting the soaking to affect the dice
| more. Is this enough to really affect how you play? The naughty
| and nice players had equal number of dots, but I feel like you
| usually have more uneven choices than that.
|
| Seems like it'd be more advantageous to make people
| over/underestimate the chance of being robbed, but this didn't
| affect the chance of a 7. Is that the same no matter which side
| you soak?
| BrenBarn wrote:
| Assuming this article is sort of tongue-in-cheek, I'll add
| something in the same spirit: The fact that the number of rolls
| _required_ for the game is too low to be able to detect the
| unfairness does not imply that "it's scientifically impossible
| for our opponents to know that we're cheating." That's fallacious
| reasoning. In any situation where people actually cared about
| this and suspected a cheat, they could just say "Let's stop the
| game for a bit, roll the dice a bunch of times, and run some
| tests". There's no requirement that the dice _only_ be rolled
| when required for the game. (If you refused to allow the test,
| that would obviously be even more suspicious.)
| Rastonbury wrote:
| If parties are willing to roll the dice hundred or thousands of
| times and end up arguing about significance, the easier thing
| to do would be to bring a cup of water and roll them a couple
| of times in the water or load the water with salt till the dice
| float lol
|
| But yeah it's tongue in cheek, talking about bayesian
| probability for the water stains opposite the sixes
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| > the standard scientific protocol tells us to conclude that we
| have no "significant" evidence that the dice are biased. (Notice
| that this is subtly different from having evidence that the dice
| are not biased! Confusing these two statements is a common
| mistake, even for trained phd scientists, and especially for
| medical doctors.)
|
| but shouldn't it be "no significant evidence that the dice aren't
| unbiased"? that's different from either
| onionisafruit wrote:
| Yes. Leaving "significant" out of the second one leaves the
| impression the author is pointing out that non-significant
| evidence is still evidence. That distracts from the actual
| point that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"
| elif wrote:
| It's kinda funny that the magnitude of the effect of this
| "cheating" is significantly less than the magnitude of the effect
| of who goes first or second.
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