(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.

[Coleus1]

The problem is not having non-deterministic dice on BGA Catan. I've played on sites that have such a setting, and it is not fun. The randomness is fun. The problem is that here, you can often tell who the winning player is going to be based on the first few rolls, regardless of settlement placement.

Furthermore, this is being ignored because some players who are very vocal on the forums, but don't actually play the game, judge the game solely based on the dice rolls, ignoring everything else.

[Jellby]

"Often" like one third of the games?

[Coleus1]

Once you played enough games you start noticing a pattern. This is my latest game and I could predict the winner before we even put down our settlements lol. And this happens way too often for it to be 1/3 of times. When was the last time you played BGA Catan btw?

[cornersofreversi]

The problem is not having non-deterministic dice on BGA Catan. I've played on sites that have such a setting, and it is not fun.

I'm not exactly sure if you are talking about the same kind of deterministic Catan variant that I was proposing. If you are, please tell me which sites. I'd be really curious to try. Thanks.