Fair dice
July 9th, 2007
I love me some Catan
Of course, the frustration of true but unfair randomness in games like Settlers of Catan is also part of the fun. And, in fact, essential. Because if you find yourself in a slight losing position, you have a reasonable expectation that quirky dice rolls may turn the game around for you. If the dice were purely fair and all probabilities exactly as expected, players in a losing position after turn four or five might find that the game becomes, basically, a hopeless chore.
Still, a very fun thought. If anyone ever does play Catan with “fair dice,” I’d love to hear how it goes.
Entry Filed under: Theory, Board Games
4 Comments Add your own
1. Nina Simon | July 9th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
My husband is obsessed with this idea. He convinced a crew of people–once and only once–to play with a set of slips of paper in a hat that contained a double set of all the dice combinations with their correct probabilities. There was a third identical set that got phased in when exactly 36 “rolls” had been taken out of the hat, and then replaced, etc.
It was, depending on who you ask, a logistical nightmare or an interesting experiment. Bottomline, the randomness difference was not significant (we played again and wrote down all our dice rolls) enough to justify the extreme inelegance of the experience.
Games like Settlers have so few rolls in them that I don’t think you can create a “fair dice” that will have significant impact without seeming too probabilistic. But I can imagine him wanting to see how this application would affect the experience… good thing we live off the grid and dice are about as high tech as it gets at home. :)
2. Alec Bings | July 9th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Good point of about Settlers having so few rolls! After I posted, I thought back and remembered how few turns a game is likely to have.
I guess Settlers is an obvious place where people want to try this, as the bell curve is explicitly built into the game (to the point that the best resource generating numbers are shown in a different color!).
At the very least, though, I know I’m going to use what I believe are “fairer” real dice the next time I play.
And really, I wouldn’t want to give up dice. There’s something fun about holding and shaking and throwing them. Even my two-year-old daughter (under supervision, of course) enjoys sorting through my bag full of polyhedrons and sorting them by shape, color, or some other algorithm known only to her.
3. Corey Porter | July 10th, 2007 at 12:38 am
Also important to remember is that there’s zero romance in computerized dice. It’s definitely a “fly the nerd flag high and proud” sort of a thing.
As for number of rolls, I don’t think that I’ve ever stopped to count. Nina, when you wrote down the real rolls, how many did it come out to? I’ll laugh (at myself) if it’s ~36. I’ll guess that it’s pretty close to that for games without expansions.
4. Alec Bings | July 10th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Too true about the romance of dice! The superstitions surrounding them (and the money expended on them) are astonishing and, frankly, fun.
Little slips of paper (didn’t they used to call the “chits”?) and computer programs just don’t have the same feel.
Have you ever seen a magician doing “dice stacking”? It’s sort of like juggling with casino dice and a leather cup. It can be quite beautiful. It has nothing to do with games, per se, but certainly captures that romance!
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