Board Game Arena

Goforit22 wrote: ↑30 October 2026, 17:49 I completely agree with poster that a game of Catan can extremely frustrating due to biased dice. Its probably also true that the dice is random, but for many games the dice is still the deciding factor.

Do you mean "biased" or "unlucky"? Because the words mean very different things. I've played plenty of Catan games where I've had unlucky dice, and yes they can be frustrating. But I've never seen any evidence to support some people's claims that the dice are biased.

Goforit22 wrote: ↑30 October 2026, 17:49 I dont get why BGA havent implemented a card deck dice generator. Imagine dice determined by a number of card decks, number of dice sets determined by their probability. When the deck(s) is depleted, it start over. Will still be randaom, but much closer to a normal distribution for every game. Will put strategy in the high seat, not lucky dice.

Catan has a dice deck available, both in physical sets and on BGA. As for other games, a dice deck doesn't always make sense, some games would be ruined by it (Backgammon for example).

Oh, and the expected distribution of the sum of two 6-sided dice is triangular, not normal. "Normal distribution" has a specific meaning, and counting dice rolls can't follow a normal distribution (normal distribution is a continuous distribution, but rolling dice are discrete).

Either this is not working as it's supposed to, or I'm totally misunderstanding how it's supposed to work. So you have a deck of cards (a deck of 36 by the looks of it) containing 'dice rolls' 2-12 occuring more or less often according to their probability, so for example: one card for 12 or 2 and five for 6 or 8. When the deck is depleted, it's reshuffled and starts over, right? Then, at the end after 60-100 turns we should see the probability represented in the game statistics and sometimes I do, but often I don't.

I was trying to add a screenshot, but didn't work..: https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=940251581

The dice deck doesn't go through the full 36 combinations exactly once before recycling - otherwise there would be a couple of turns each game where the results would be predictable. The BGA dice deck mechanism is outlined in https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=49941

For the printed (face-to-face) dice decks, the instructions are to reshuffle a few (five?) cards before the end, not wait until the entire deck has been run through.