Old game, new tricks: Settlers of Catan

The picture above shows a recent game of Settlers of Catan.  We had 5 players that night, but I don't have the expansion that allows more than 4 players.  We almost gave up on it.  But as you can see we used some black trains from Ticket to Ride, and some black duderinos from Caracassone to create a 5th player.  It worked so well that I have to look hard at the picture to notice the difference.



After writing an article about how we expect uneven roll distributions in Settlers, I wanted to try a modification to remove some of the randomness.  My first idea was to write a python script to return random numbers, but ensure that every set of 36 rolls exactly matched the ideal 2d6 distribution.  It was pointed out to me that I could just a deck of cards to replace dice rolls, and it wouldn't require a computer.  So I did. I started with a normal set of cards.  There aren't enough 6s, 7s, or 8s, so I used Aces and a sharpee to make a 6, two 7s, and an 8.  I used Jack for 11.  It only took a few minutes.

How did the game go with a deck instead of dice?  Everybody had fun.  I liked knowing that I could count on my 3 and 4 to pay off for sure, just less often than other numbers.  It made the robber seem worse when it actually blocked your from getting resources, because you had literally wasted a good roll. That card was out of the deck until we reshuffled.