Board Game Arena

Hello players,

A new option have been added to Catan.
This optionhas been directly designed by the Catan Studios team for the BGA adaptation.

This is the new "Dice Deck" option, which replaces the dice with a stack of cards. Visually, nothing changes — you will still see the dice rolling on screen — but information about the card stack (such as the remaining cards and when the deck is shuffled) is now available in the logs.

This is how the dice deck works:

- A stack with 36 cards is build. On these cards the results of 2 dices are written based on the expected statistical probabilities: 2=1; 3=2x; 4=3x; 5=4x; 6=5x; 7=6x; 8=5x; 9=4x; 10=3x; 11=2x; 12=1
- 18 cards are removed randomly.
- Now a second stack is build in the same way, so that you have two stacks with 18 cards in the end.
- Both stacks are shuffled together to form a new stack of 36 cards.

Each turn a card is drawn from the virtual stack forming the dice number for that turn. If the stack runs out it will be created again in the same way.

Note: This procedure is different than the one explained in the Traders & Barbarians expansion, because in online play it may be possible that a player can has a higher chance to predict the next number, if the dice results are written down secretly. This would not be so easy in a game at a table. Therefore the procedure was changed especially for online games.

1. Was this approve by the rights owner?

2. If the first two "rolls" are 12 (once every ~2500 games), abandon all hope for any other 12 for the next 34 "rolls"

1. Was this approve by the rights owner?

Approved and designed by the Catan Studio team directly.

2. If the first two "rolls" are 12 (once every ~2500 games), abandon all hope for any other 12 for the next 34 "rolls"

That's what people want apparently

darhf wrote: ↑28 June 2026, 08:59
Note: This procedure is different than the one explained in the Traders & Barbarians expansion, because in online play it may be possible that a player can has a higher chance to predict the next number, if the dice results are written down secretly. This would not be so easy in a game at a table. Therefore the procedure was changed especially for online games.

Strange. I thought the ability to predict the next number(s) was the point of using a card deck.

darhf wrote: ↑28 June 2026, 10:41

1. Was this approve by the rights owner?

Approved and designed by the Catan Studio team directly.

My bad, I somehow assumed that "Catan Studio" was a name for the BGA Catan developers. I see now it's the actual publisher, so the information was already in the first post

darhf wrote: ↑28 June 2026, 10:41

2. If the first two "rolls" are 12 (once every ~2500 games), abandon all hope for any other 12 for the next 34 "rolls"

That's what people want apparently

Also with dice the probability of the first two rolls being 12 is actually higher: 1 in 1296.

I disagree that's what people want. People will complain no matter what, and they don't know what they want: except that they want to win and believe it's because of their skill.

I believe that the variant might be quite popular because it greatly reduces the luck factor. In my opinion the idea of drawing twice a 18-subset out of 36 is a nice idea.

Obviously there will be still many complaints because enough randomness remains. In a typical game of 40-50 rolls there will be games without a single 4, or games where 10 is rolled more often than 8, etc.

Can we have seafarers expansion? Or 5-6 Players with big Maps?

CurryNektar wrote: ↑29 June 2026, 11:41 Can we have seafarers expansion? Or 5-6 Players with big Maps?

X2 plz Catan Studios team

Seafarers is coming, it's being alpha tested at the moment.