(Almost) Deterministic Catan

[cornersofreversi]

Hey all,

I know many of us tend to get annoyed after a sequence of unfortunate dice rolls, and the arguments about just how random the dice are is probably never truly going to satisfy everyone. So, here's my dream Catan variant: an almost deterministic one where the only purpose of the dice is to determine if you roll a 7 or not. Suppose you have a settlement at the corner of a sheep 4, wood 5 and wheat 8. With every roll of the dice, if it's not a 7, you receive resources based on the probability of those numbers; that is 3/36th of a sheep, 4/36th of a wood and 5/36th of a wheat. You collect fractional resources and get to use them in integer amounts just like in the standard game play. If someone rolls a 7, and you have more than 7 resources combined, you lose about half of your resources as usual (you may discard resources in fractional amounts). Say you have 8 and 9/36th resources combined. You lose 4 and 4/36th of them. You may, for example discard 2 and 23/36th wood, 1 and 11/36th ore and 6/36th brick. For everything else, the game follows the standard rules.

If nothing else, this could be a fun way to teach kids how to add fractional numbers

[Jellby]

Why not do the same for the 7? Every turn you lose 1/12 of your resources if you have more than 7, and steal 1/12 resource from each of your opponents (in a 3-player game). And of course your settlements and cities earn you 1/18 less than normally, to account for the probability of the robber being on each hex.

[Ingoschi]

And each time you buy a development, you get a 14/25 knight, 1/5 VP, 2/25 road building, 2/25 year of plenty and 2/25 monopoly?

[euklid314]

Of so many suggestions how to tweak Catan - this is definitely one of the better ones. Details definitely need to be discussed (e.g. which variant of 7-rule to take, ...) but in principle it could work out fine.

Although I am a strategic/tactical player and definitely would try out such a variant (if somebody implemented it which is not possible on BGA), I would definitely miss the random part of Catan too much and would soon switch back to regular Catan.