Crazy Settlers
April 1, 2007
A co-worker of mine recently started playing Settlers of Catan. Though he seemed to like the game he didn’t like the set way to layout the tiles and place the numbers. In typical developer fashion he wrote the Settlers of Catan Board Generator. This application can generate a standard board but also long, skinny boards. It will also randomly place the numbers.
We played a couple games and it was fun because it was different. Playing on a long snake like board opened up some different strategies but also made apparent why Settlers board’s are setup in a certain way.
The main problem is the random placement of the numbers can create one or two really good spots (i.e. a spot adjacent to two sixes) and the winner is decided by who gets to place first. For example, say board shown on the right is generated. The player that gets first turn is going place their piece on the double brick (6-8, in the top right corner). If that same player is able to get on a 2-for-1 brick then they have a huge advantage before the first round.
I’m not sure how many rounds a typical Settlers (Google was no help) lasts but I’ll try to estimate it. Say the average game is 60 minutes long with 4 players. Each player has an equal amount of turns and a, on average, will take the same amount of time per turn. The average turn involves rolling the dice, collecting your cards, then trading. Let’s say the average turn takes a minute so a game will typically have 60 turns, or 60 rolls of the dice. The number of times a number will come up in this game is:
2: (2.78% * 60) = 1.67
3: (5.56% * 60) = 3.34
4: (8.83% * 60) = 5.30
5: (11.11% * 60) = 6.67
6: (13.89% * 60) = 8.33
7: (16.67% * 60) = 10.00
8: (13.89% * 60) = 8.33
9: (11.11% * 60) = 6.67
10: (8.83% * 60) = 5.30
11: (5.56% * 60) = 3.34
12: (2.78% * 60) = 1.67
Now the player that is on the 6-8 brick corner is probably going to be able to place their last settlement on another 6 or 8 title. That means over the course of the game they will get 24 resources from their initial settlements alone. Other players who only control 2 6/8 titles will be get 8 less resources. I know this a bit simplistic as there are other factors such as the robber, cities, etc but I think it shows just how much of an advantage that first player has.
Playing on these random boards really gives you an appreciation on how hard Klaus Teuber (the designer of Settlers) must have worked to make the game balanced. If your board of the standard Settler’s game then give the random generator a try. You can also try variations found at the University of Catan site. I haven’t tried any of these special rules (I haven’t even found time to play all the expansions for Settlers yet) but some of them are written by Teuber so should be pretty interesting and balanced.
If you don’t like the luck factor of Catan then you try the new Settlers Event Cards which replace the dice with a deck of cards.
April 21, 2007 at 1:00 pm
As the creator of the Catan Generator, my friends and I have been playing heaps of games lately. We primarily use the generator to create random shapes. As we have been playing we are finding what combination of options works best.
The Catan Generator has a new option to specify how ‘clumped’ or ‘grouped’ you want the land plates to be. So if you only have two players, we have found that a setup that is more spread out provides a very fun game for the two players. When the land gets more clumped together, it is less likely that two players will cross paths on the board, so when we do play with just two players with a medium grouping of land plates, we play up to 12 or 13 points. (Actually our last game went up to 18, superfun!). Then if you have three players, a medium grouping up to 10 points still works out well.
One other tweak we have added (which is an option available on the Catan Generator) is to replace the 2 die tile with a second 12 die tile. Then what happens when a 2 is rolled is that the person who rolls it gets to choose one resource card from the bank. Another thing we are thinking about adding is a single 7 tile! None of us like the fact that rolling a 7 means no resources for anyone, other than one stolen card.
For me the reason we have played so much is the fresh challenge of a new layout each time. But if you like the traditional shape, playing it with the random land and dice tile layouts can be fun as well. I think that the layout outlined above in Chris’ blog would still be fun with four players. The key thing omitted in the analysis above is that this game is played by humans!
When we choose to play, sometimes we have a player who is picky about the board, so we just let her sit at the computer and keep hitting the generate button as many times as she likes until she is happy. When we have players who don’t care, we tell ourselves we will play the 5th board generated, no matter what it turns out to look like. We even like just setting up the new board, it looks like a thing of beauty on the table.
Well if you are a Settlers fan, I hope you give it a go and enjoy.
May 29, 2007 at 2:56 pm
1 minute turns!! Who have you been playing with??
May 29, 2007 at 11:32 pm
1 minute was just an estimate and I figured I would estimate low. If the actual number of rolls a game are is hire then numbers increase which would help prove my point.
I couldn’t find any numbers on the Internet. We will have to time our next game.