Board Game Arena

Hi,

I play quite a lot of Catan arena matches.
1 thing I noticed is that when you place a robber at a certain number in more than 30% ov the cases the dice come immediately at that certain number.
Do more people experience this?

Humain brain is great to see patterns when there is none.

If someone block your 9 and you roll 9, you will remember it.
If someone block your 9 and 9 is never rolled after, you will not remember it.

We got that feeling too when playing Catan IRL years ago.


Start to do stats and note in a document/paper every time that happen or not. Do it 100 times. That will never be more than 30%. That's less than 14% in average, so even 20% is unlikely and would be weird.

Yeah, i am aware of what you saying about human brain but I am quite sure that this really is a pattern

Yes, that's true, I've noticed that too.

Samba12345678 wrote: ↑23 January 2026, 18:19Yeah, i am aware of what you saying about human brain but I am quite sure that this really is a pattern

Really a lot of claims like that one on the forum has been done.
And if you check the numbers, they are extremely rarely right. 99% of cases are just people missunderstood probability/people which got (un)lucky before their forum posts.

Even if other people back you up on that, that said nothing since most people would be biaised.

Sorry to say: Dice posts that solely rely on "feeling" have been proven to be always wrong.

I analyzed only the last 2 games of Samba12345678, namely #794731443 and #794717589, respectively.

The ratio is 13:3 in the first game and 12:1 in the last game, i.e. 25:4 in both games combined.

Out of 29 situations where the robber was moved (by 7s or Knight cards), only 4 times the blocked number was rolled afterwards. This is a 13.8% occurrence.

Unless Samba (or anybody else) provides us a series of at least 10 consecutive games where the percentage is above 30% we can end the discussion. Since the claim is 30%, there should be many such sequences and it should not really take a long time to find such a sequence.

Warning: The argument that the claim is still true because one can simply "feel" it but one just dont want to bother with counting the numbers is rather weak.

To connect with another unrelated thread, I believe this is most effectively proved by asking ChatGPT

Tnx for the check on my games!! Quality I didn't expect.
I will remain silent (till I can prove otherwise:))

Samba12345678 wrote: ↑24 January 2026, 13:10 Tnx for the check on my games!! Quality I didn't expect.
I will remain silent (till I can prove otherwise:))

I respect the attitude! Of course if I get statistical data that seem to show something wrong I will invest even more time for my analysis (2 games is only an indication but no evidence).

If proven wrong I will stand corrected - but it has never happened in comparable cases. The human biases are just too strong and it is virtually impossible to guess the percentages correctly without actually crunching numbers....

Your comment gave away what is actually happening. You "notice". not that it is statistically happening more frequently, only you "notice" it.

If you were asked what number rolled 4 rolls back you likely couldn't remember without looking. But when the robber is on the tile that then blocked you and/or the tile of the resource you need then yeah you notice and send remember it easily.