Board Game Arena

I play Catan because I love the game, but I am so frequently irritated by the dice algorithms. It's a BGA flaw that is maddening. The rolls are ridiculously streaky and disproportionate to the probabilities. Please fix this problem that everybody complains about.

Sinnerman88 wrote: ↑28 October 2026, 03:20 Please fix this problem that everybody complains about.

A few people complain about it regularly. Everybody would be a lot more noisey considering that roughly 5,000 games a day of Catan are played on the site.

It's easier to implement a random number generator than to code up dice that are not random. I doubt there's an issue with the dice. Human beings, on the other hand, are very, very bad at judging whether something is truly random. In particular, random data is far more 'streaky' than most people intuitively expect.

This reminds of the discussion here, and the many 1 star reviews that backgammon apps receive...

https://www.njsoftware.com/note.html

Here's an analysis of half a million random numbers generated by BGA:
https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... and#p59122

The dice are weighted exactly as expected. Sorry about your bad luck.

Ahh, this thread is different to the countless other threads, because the OP has thoughtfully provided not just an anecdote but supporting evidence and rigorous analysis. We won't need to call Lenny.

Oh.