The dice in Catan are not completely random

[tboard]

I know this topic has been discussed before, so I just want to echo what several others have already said. I have noticed that whenever you have more than 7 cards in your hand, there tends to be a much higher likelihood of you rolling a 7 on your turn. This is something I have noticed in all of my games. And it's rather obvious as well. It seems the developers for this game thought it to be a good idea to do this. And to be honest, I can understand why they did it. But having played this game more than 60 times, I can say that it is not fun to play the game knowing that you are even further punished for having more cards in your hand due to the way the game was made. I am hoping BGA can scale back the probability of rolling a 7 to more normal levels when one has more than 7 cards in their hand. Please make the necessary changes to best emulate the playing experience one would get when playing the actual board game.

[Strode]

I have noticed that whenever you have more than 7 cards in your hand, there tends to be a much higher likelihood of you rolling a 7 on your turn. This is something I have noticed in all of my games.

Do you have any evidence to support this? Or is it just your perception? Perceptions can be misleading. People notice certain results and not others.

[Romain672]

We got the same impression IRL some years ago.
It's just that you see the time where this happen, and don't remember the time where this doesn't happen.

[Jellby]

Yep, that's the way real dice work. They can feel your fear and stress, and take advantage of it.

[thoun]

Yep, that's the way real dice work. They can feel your fear and stress, and take advantage of it.

Best answer to unproven claims like this

[el cosimo]

Only thing I can say.. here we work with random numbers.. there is no relation with the order of a dice. When you throw on RL, the dice get always 1,2,3 close to each other and 4,5,6 close to each other. If you throw straight.. the dice will always go from dice 6 to 2 to 1 to 5 and then again 6.

With random you just get a random number without the physic effect… but I don’t think the result will difference much.. or you must have a tactic to throw what you want

[euklid314]

tboard, since you made a very definite claim about the dice behavior you can easily prove/disprove your assumption. Please do it (similar to my analysis below) and you will see that you fell into the trap of confirmation bias.

I have analyzed your two games directly before you wrote your postings (here and at the Catan forum). I expected to find many instances of 7s when players had 8+ ressources - otherwise you would not have written your posting at exactly this moment. And indeed - both of the games were with slightly above-average number of 7s in the total game but only one of the two games had significantly more 7s when 8+ ressources were involved. But the last 2 games before you wrote your posting are not representative. You wrote your posting BECAUSE those games had (slightly) above average values - but nothing that will not happen every now and then.

It is your job now to analyze your next 10 or so games, starting today - it will only take 5-10 minutes per game. If your claim should be correct the behavior would show also in the future. You have to analyze future games that are played AFTER you made your claim or you analyze LOTS of games from the past.

game #377210747: 8+RESSOURCE SITUATIONS: 3 7s out of 9 situations (33.3%), TOTAL GAME: 13 7s out of 58 rolls (22.4%)

game #377140176: 8+RESSOURCE SITUATIONS: 4 7s out of 18 situations (22.2%), TOTAL GAME: 11 7s out of 54 rolls (20.4%)

If one only looks at your personal situation in those two games: You had 9 chances to lose ressources and only in 2 of these situations a 7 was rolled. That is slightly above average (22.2%) but nothing extraordinary for only 9 rolls.


Off topic, a strategy tip: In game game #377210747 you started with duplicating 4 and 11, i.e. your starting locations were at the numbers 4,4,6,9,11,11. Also in game game #377140176 you only had 4 different starting numbers. Duplicating numbers always increases the 8+ressource danger since you get either no ressource or double ressources. Always try to get 5-6 different numbers for your starting locations such that the ressources will trickle in permanently and not be clustered timewise. If you have to double a number with your starting locations then only take a high probability one (6,8,5,9) and even then do not take multiple of them.