A naïvely constructed die - i.e. a perfect cube, but with pips dug out for each face - will already bias in favor of 6 rolls and away from 1 rolls simply because six pips require removing more material (and therefore mass) than one pip. Likewise with 5/2 and 4/3. The "precision" dice used in e.g. casinos address this by filling in the pips with material exactly as dense as the die's base material; the injection-molded dice in most board games (let alone wooden dice) obviously ain't constructed with that level of care.
This is also part of the reason why some dice games - particularly those typically played with cheap dice - deem 1 to be more valuable than 6 (example: Farkle) or require at least one 1 roll to win (example: 1-4-24). Or they'll require some number of high dice to make the game ever-so-slightly less brutal (example: Ship-Captain-Crew).
burch45 · 8h ago
Yes. Very funny for the author to spend a lot of time talking about null hypothesis testing, but not actually running a control experiment to test the null hypothesis that his dice are actually different from the stock dice.
brookst · 2h ago
I like to believe that Klaus Teuber secretly specified dice biased towards 1-2-3, strictly for personal benefit in games, and the author’s approach has obscured a much greater effect in that direction.
MathMonkeyMan · 1h ago
The author's wife could only tolerate so much.
hinkley · 8h ago
I remember a retired engineer was selling perfectly balanced dice intended for RPG players. RPG players are going to gravitate toward the most unfair dice they perceive in their set. I appreciate his enthusiasm but he’s only going to sell those dice to competitions and maybe GMs.
I think that’s one of the reasons GMs sometimes make a high roll from the player into a punishment. Especially by asking for the roll first and telling what they were looking for after. It’s a way to balance out the consequences of unintentionally loaded dice.
ultimafan · 5h ago
About the last point- I remember hearing somewhere, though it could be an urban legend, that that's precisely the reason early Dungeons & Dragons (OD&D/AD&D era) had so many variations within different dice roll mechanics for whether or not a high (or low) roll was good or bad (ie high rolls for your attack was good, high rolls for initiative were bad).
If the player used the same dice for all rolls, a balance check against biased or loaded die was therefore built directly into the game, with the perk of making it very obvious if a player was using specific dice for specific rolls
gigaflop · 7h ago
You reminded me, and I think I have some, or at least some variety of these as a set of 10d6. Metal, and the pips are precisely machined to such depths where they're perfectly balanced. Nice bronzed finish, with black pips.
Also, if someone is obviously cheating with a loaded die at an RPG game, they're not the kind of player that should be invited back. Most characters have ways of increasing their modifiers to rolls that matter most to them (My current ranger is 1d20 +16 for Perception), and having high-enough base numbers can mean that anything other than a natural 1 is usually some kind of success.
hinkley · 7h ago
I would like to have Laura Bailey’s dice checked by an independent party for instance. Her substantial superstitions about good vs bad dice are an example of what I’m talking about above. Lucky dice don’t have to be intentional cheating, but people who have lucky dice are likely cheating in plain sight.
vkou · 8h ago
"20? Your axe cleaves straight through through the orc, decapitating him, and reducing the pillar behind him to rubble!"
"You should probably know that this was a load-bearing pillar."
geoffpado · 5h ago
It looks in the photo at the bottom like that the pips are painted on, not dug out. While that might bias things slightly, I'd expect that the amount of paint used is minimal.
n2d4 · 5h ago
Most commonly, the pips are slightly dug out, then paint is put into the holes.
ajsnigrutin · 1h ago
I just checked a cheap set of dice in my 100-games-in-1 box, and the 1 dot is both wider and deeper than the 6 dots on the 6, the dots in the 2 also seem a bit deeper than the ones on the 6 side. I don't have any precise instrument to measure them, but it could be that the mold designer accounted for the removed (well.. not cast) material for the dice.
GavinMcG · 8h ago
Is the bias from having more or fewer pips just as strong as the bias introduced by the water?
yellowapple · 8h ago
Depends on a lot of variables, I'd think:
- How dense is the wood?
- How much wood does each pip remove?
- How much water does the wood absorb per unit of volume?
- Are any capillary effects at play transferring absorbed water into the rest of the die?
- Is it better to soak the 6 side to take advantage of more surface area? Or the 1 side to take advantage of more soakable volume?
- Is the wood even uniformly dense to begin with?
n2d4 · 9h ago
An interesting way to spice up any board game is to openly use loaded dice, but without any player knowing which numbers it favors. This adds a layer of strategy to whatever game you're playing, although it loses its appeal when people start taking out their calculators.
brookst · 2h ago
Probably equally fun to tell people you’re doing that, and use completely fair dice.
asciimov · 4h ago
I’ve played a bunch of Catan. The included wooden dice are all terribly biased. Not in the same way, but enough that a sets owner knows, at least subconsciously, what numbers their set favors.
The best way I’ve found to mitigate this is to have a bag of assorted dice with the set. The various sizes and materials, with a swap out at every game, makes sure the dice bias isn’t predictable.
Regarding dice decks. I find they make the game sterile. A near perfect bell curve means you can anticipate number droughts or floods, aiding in robber strategy.
brookst · 2h ago
Expand on that last? How would you anticipate a drought or flood from a bell curve? These are independent rolls… you’re not heading into gambler’s fallacy territory, are you?
asciimov · 1h ago
The dice deck has a perfect bell curve of dice rolls, this means the same number of 6’s and 8’s, 4’s and 10’s. If you go on a tear you can pull most of the 6’s from the deck in short order, a flood. Making it difficult or impossible to pull anymore till the deck is reshuffled, the drought. Meanwhile the odds of pulling other cards go up.
This is somewhat mitigated with cards that require you to reshuffle the deck. Even with shuffle cards included the numbers are too evenly distributed or balanced removing any feeling of randomness or luck from the game.
toast0 · 2h ago
With a dice deck, you no longer have independent rolls, and you can count cards. You could probably mitigate by shuffling early, like casinos do for blackjack.
sdwr · 2h ago
> dice decks
hinkley · 8h ago
I won a Settlers game against my boss who never invited me again. I don’t know what was wrong with his dice but we saw 6’s about three times as often as 8’s which makes me think one of the dice was borked and was rolling unevenly. I was in the picking rotation in a way where I ended up with several 6’s and I just steamrolled the entire game.
c22 · 3h ago
One time my buddy Mike cleaned up a game of settlers by focusing his entire empire around a '2' tile. We rolled snake eyes dozens of times during that game. We used the same dice every time we played (once a week for over a decade) and never had another game like that one.
vunderba · 9h ago
Tangentially related but one of the reasons casinos use translucent dice is to make it easier to perform visual inspections to check for injected weights under the pips, etc.
ultimafan · 9h ago
Interesting to think about- would it really matter if the casino was loading their dice? Craps allows you to bet for/against almost every possible bet and you usually have people playing pass/don't pass and come/don't come on the same table. Offering weighted dice to screw some players out of their money is probably going to result in the other players making just as much if not more back. Superstitious players absolutely would notice a "streak" and switch their bets to match it, and the casino isn't going to be able to swap/take away the dice without killing the vibe and making those same players cash out.
Feels like it's in their best interest to have a "fair" game where they skim some percentage of odds off the top.
HWR_14 · 54m ago
It is in their best interest to have a fair game. The transparent dice are to prevent the players from cheating the casino, not prove it's fair to the players.
andrewla · 8h ago
A lot of money in craps gets bet on odds that are close to even-money. It's hard, I think, to weight dice so that the house would increase their take by a measurable amount.
A lot of the effective value of a casino is gamblers ruin -- gamblers stop betting when they run out of money, but the house can't run out of money. If the game has sufficient variance and the players are not aware of the bias, then the house still wins.
ultimafan · 6h ago
It's for a reason similar to this that the only game I will play in casinos is craps.
It's not hard to imagine ways to get cheated out of a "fair" bet in card games, roulette, slots, etc. whether it's a mechanical cheat, sleight of hand, adjustment of odds, or whatever. Not saying it happens or is even a common occurrence but it's very easy to imagine ways it COULD happen or has happened in the past that are impossible for the player to detect.
Craps is the only game it feels like to me where provided the payout odds used are the same standard you see everywhere and the dice aren't metallic there is virtually no way to cheat the player/a bet in a way that wouldn't also benefit another player/another bet.
thatnerd · 8h ago
For a casino? In practice, yes, fair games are perfectly consistent with greedily skimming a game, and fair games draw gamblers.
That said, when organized crime gets involved, somebody always thinks "if I rig this, I'll do EVEN BETTER!" Maybe they're a corrupt employee skimming from the house, maybe they're a loyal employee skimming for the house, but unless you have something like the Nevada Gaming Control Board forcing fairness on them, you basically never get it. At least, from what I've read on the subject. Source: I've read some books on card counting & otherwise beating the odds in casinos, and this my vague memory.
And it's ironic that the house wants to rig games, because a biased game means a mathematically savvy individual can go in and calculate how results differ from "fair" games, and can then skim some profits for themselves if the bias is larger than the house advantage.
hnfong · 8h ago
Cheaters might be able to sneak in some loaded dice, so the dice being easy to inspect is good for the house.
praptak · 8h ago
It doesn't hurt for them to make it easier for the more paranoid players to inspect stuff.
Also there's the scenario of an employee colluding with a player.
bee_rider · 8h ago
This might be a better cheat for… I dunno, maybe risk? Or monopoly?
In settlers, trade is always important… getting an early lead can get you ganged up on. At least in my experience, the best way to win is to look like you are in second place, line things up (get close to some crucial port for example) and then rocket past the Designated Villain only when doing so will get you a really solid lead.
1123581321 · 8h ago
Just lay low with slightly larger hands early on. You can afford this since your total resource production needed to win isn't as dependent on an early settlement or city. Maybe let yourself get hosed by the robber once to build sympathy. With more extreme number hexes rolling more consistently, your card accumulation will be less spiky, so you should have a smoother endgame even if others won't trade.
misja111 · 9h ago
FYI if you are suspicious that your opponent is cheating, it's easy to verify if dice are loaded or not: drop them in a glass of water a couple of times. If every time the same side ends upwards they are loaded.
nartho · 8h ago
Saturate the cup of water with salt so the dice float, then just roll the dice in the water
zaik · 8h ago
> Surprisingly, we’ll prove that standard scientific tests are not powerful enough to determine that the dice are unfair while playing a game.
This, or the process of loading the dice was simply not very effective.
hiccuphippo · 8h ago
I remember somewhere, might have been the Catan Android app, had an option to use cards instead of dice. The cards had all the combinations so no number could come up more often than it should. Never got to play it that way but it looks like an interesting solution to people complaining certain numbers come up too often.
asciimov · 5h ago
The cards are interesting, they include a card to force shuffle the deck in order to make sure there is some randomness in the outcomes.
Even with the forced shuffle cards, the outcomes fall too much in the bell curve and make the game feel sterile. Because if you get a flood of 5’s and 6’s you know a drought is soon upon you.
vunderba · 7h ago
Interesting - kind of reminds me of "bag randomization" that some versions of Tetris use. Bag is filled with an equal distribution of all possible pieces and dealt randomly until empty at which point the pieces are placed back in the bag and the process is started all over again.
cde-v · 8h ago
That option existed for the physical game as well, just as a separate purchase. I do not see it for sale anymore anywhere which is weird.
mechanicum · 5h ago
They bundled it into the Traders & Barbarians expansion.
bell-cot · 8h ago
With a deck or few of regular playing cards, not using the 7's through kings, it'd be easily enough to get the same effect.
hiccuphippo · 7h ago
The one I was talking about would be cards from 2 to 12 representing both dice, one card for 2 and 12, two cards for 3 and 11, and so on. So you would need six cards to represent 7, but your point still prevails.
cde-v · 7h ago
Good point, hadn't thought about that. Probably why they don't sell it anymore.
dave333 · 5h ago
Another way to look at board games and sports in general is as an alternative to war - settling disputes in a non-violent way and building social cohesion in the process. In board games there are no real losers and in war there are no real winners. So a win at all costs strategy may not be necessary.
It's like Risk but you submit each round's actions in advance and they are resolved simultaneously, rather than turn-by-turn. All of the action is off the board, not on it. Coalition-building, intelligence gathering and managing trust—even when betrayal is inevitable.
I learned a lot from that game.
FridayoLeary · 3h ago
I slowly learned when i started playing catan, that by playing against another player, you are virtually guaranteed to lose. You can only win if you cooperate with others. A valuable life lesson.
charlieyu1 · 8h ago
I’m not sure how much I trusted the data, surely the water would have been dried over a week
redcobra762 · 4h ago
The "criticism" of a p-value was strange to me, because it's never taught to be an "end all" answer to a question, rather it's taught as a way of determining statistical significance. Every stats or economic analytics course I took in college explained that hypothesis rejection involved critical thinking in addition to p-value analysis.
xivzgrev · 8h ago
Settlers brings out my angry side. I had a period of playing 1 on 1 with my wife, and she kept winning. That wasn't the frustrating part - what I didn't like was how early leads compound into larger leads as the game rolls on. So you know you are going to lose, and you just keep losing more. Much like Monopoly.
At least with games like chess, you might be down but you still have some hope of coming back with some maneuvering.
Maybe what I didn't like was the parallels with life. There's not usually a rabbit in the hat to come out on top, the rich just get richer.
hibikir · 7h ago
Settlers is a poor 2 player game: It's really designed for more. Then balance comes form bashing the leader mechanisms: Unfavorable trades, robber uses always hitting them and so on.
bigstrat2003 · 7h ago
Settlers of Catan explicitly requires 3 players, in fact. I'm not terribly surprised it doesn't work great with 2.
mzs · 5h ago
You can apply The Settlers of Zarahemla setup and trading rules to Catan (while avoiding the additional mechanics in Zarahemla) to create a 2-player Catan. It does have the problem xivzgrev mentioned if you do not each secretly adopt different atypical strategies each game.
jbverschoor · 7h ago
Yeah I’m so sick of getting bashed haha
cycomanic · 7h ago
I think that might be a function of playing 1 on 1. At some point (when settlers was still only popular in Germany), we (4 player game) played with one of my best friends flatmates who was at the time winning a lot of the tournaments in Germany. He would consistently whoop our butts no matter how the game started (and all others of us were pretty big board gamers as well). It was amazing to see how little he relied on chance, his dominance became even more apparent once we used the cities and knights extension.
ben7799 · 8h ago
I never played enough Settlers to pick up on this but I totally get it with Monopoly, and I feel like this is bad game design when it happens.
Monopoly feels like the game might take 4 hours but you know 20 minutes in that you're hopelessly behind and cannot come back. Then it's just 3 hours and 40 minutes of torture.
If you're doomed to lose the game should be over quick.
nothrabannosir · 7h ago
In the case of Monopoly that feeling is the point of the game:
> The history of Monopoly can be traced back to 1903,[1][8] when American anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie created a game called The Landlord's Game that she hoped would explain the single-tax theory of Henry George as laid out in his book Progress and Poverty. It was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies. She took out a patent in 1904. Her game was self-published beginning in 1906.[9][10]
> If you're doomed to lose the game should be over quick.
I think most people are in this situation in life, but would disagree with you. The game itself was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies, hard to get the message when it's over quickly.
praptak · 7h ago
Yes, this design was intentional. Moreover, Monopoly as we know it today was intended to be one of two rulesets, the sucky one.
The good one was intended to demonstrate a better alternative.
Sohcahtoa82 · 7h ago
> Monopoly feels like the game might take 4 hours
For what it's worth, if you play Monopoly by the actual rules, and you don't act stupidly stingy on your trade offers, a 4-player game of Monopoly shouldn't take more than 30-45 minutes.
The problem is, people of course don't like losing, and everybody loves a comeback story. So people play with house rules that constantly inject extra money into the game, which prolongs the game's purpose: For all the wealth to consolidate to a single player.
House rules in Monopoly are so common that a lot of people don't even realize they're playing house rules!
Do you give money for landing on Free Parking? You're playing a house rule.
Do you give $400 instead of $200 for LANDING on Go? You're playing a house rule.
Do you allow purchasing Hotels when there aren't enough houses? Do you allow building to not be even? Do you use some sort of object to act like a hotel because the game only comes with 12 hotels in the box? You're playing house rules. The fact there are only 12 hotels and 32 houses was a deliberate design choice to force players to trade and allow one player to horde all the houses and hotels.
You can't mortgage properties that have buildings on them. You must sell the buildings first, and you only get half of what you paid for them from the bank. When you unmortage, you have to pay an extra 10% fee. You don't collect rent on mortgaged properties. If you play any differently, you're playing a house rule.
Rolling doubles 3 times sends you to jail. That's actually NOT a house rule!
Speaking of jail, you DO still collect rent while in it! This means that deliberately staying in jail can actually be a strategic move if another player is possibly about to land on your dark Green properties (Baltic, North Carolina, Pennsylvania) while your opponent owns the Oranges, which you're likely to land on immediately after leaving jail.
Don't get me wrong, Monopoly is a shitty game for many reasons, but "Games take 2+ hours" is not one of them unless you're playing it wrong.
toast0 · 2h ago
All that, and you didn't mention auctions. If you don't buy it from the bank at the list price, it's up for auction and everything should be owned pretty quick.
alabastervlog · 5h ago
Monopoly’s maybe the only board game I prefer playing in computerized form.
Even the one on the NES is totally fine.
Rules enforced without having to remember them, auctions run for you, nobody has to be the banker, no manual book-keeping for how much is owed where and mortgage status and all that.
Plays so much faster and smoother than the real thing, and no dumb house rules making it last forever for no good reason.
gowld · 1h ago
Ironically, "horde all the houses" (everyone get houses) is the opposite of "hoard all the houses" (one person gets all the houses).
Sohcahtoa82 · 44m ago
Ah, hell. That would be my previous WoW addiction making me confuse "hoard" with "horde".
mgh2 · 7h ago
Not exactly a parallel with monopoly, which I agree, is like life, where early advantages results in the rich getting richer, the injustice makes it boring and frustrating.
In Settlers there are actually strategies and "luck" is more evenly distributed. You can vary your approach or strategy - ex: by focusing on upgrading to cities as early as possible to give you 2x advantage, regardless of starting locations.
Parallel to life: birth location determines most of luck in life (opportunities, income, connections, friends), but you can increase this advantage by moving, within certain constraints (education, visa, marriage, etc.).
Nevertheless, luck is certainly the most important factor.
In a better and not broken world, laws (rules of the game) will try to avoid the 1st and reflect the later. Ex: antitrust, immigration, affirmative action, etc.
GeneralMayhem · 5h ago
Settlers might have less of a snowball effect than Monopoly, but it's definitely there. Pretty much any resource-gathering game is going to have it. If your resource numbers get rolled early on, you get to be the first one to build a city or a third settlement. Then your income is higher, so you'll get to the 4th point faster. And so on.
Like another commentor said, the intended fix for this in Settlers is social dynamics: the leader is going to be blocked from the best settling spots, isn't going to get favorable trade deals, and is going to get hammered by the robber. The key strategic gameplay in Settlers is not about profit maximization (that's pretty easy to do), it's about minimizing any appearance that you're a threat until it's too late to do anything about it. If players never collaborate to take down the leader, then early gains can definitely beget later gains.
alabastervlog · 4h ago
Even with the social fix, there’s usually one person (sometimes two!) in a four-player game who does nothing wrong but is basically out by the second or third time around the board, just hanging around to help the one or two other non-lead players harass the leader but with no viable path to victory short of an insane run of luck with the dice (or, if you’re me, as soon you realize this has happened to you, you help the leader get ahead faster so you can move on to a better game sooner…)
snarf21 · 7h ago
We are living in the renaissance of board game design right now. Settlers is a step forward from Monopoly but is still just a roll-and-do and it also suffers horribly from king making and other design problems. There are so many amazing board games out there right now for every skill level and taste.
ungreased0675 · 6h ago
Would you recommend a few that are beginner friendly and available at my local board game shop?
peeters · 17m ago
Parks for a novel game design, gorgeous artwork and tactile pieces. Mid complexity.
Pandemic Legacy for one of the best experiences you'll have with the same group of friends over months (cooperative, play through once over 12-24 sittings). The game builds in complexity as you play so it starts reasonably simple (though the first season starts with the basic ruleset of Pandemic so if you've played that it's a head start but not necessary).
Kingdomino and Cascadia for quicker terrain building games, I consider these fairly similar though Kingdomino is quicker and simpler. These I can play with anyone.
Paperback if you already like word games like Scrabble etc, and want to dip into playing a deck building game.
The Crew if you like trick-taking card games, it's a co-op variant to games like Bridge or Euchre.
Carcassone is an oldie but goodie. Very social compared to many competitive games, as though it's turn based everyone wants to have their say for what you should do with your piece. Compared to e.g. Wingspan where you're largely ignoring/out of the loop for what's going on with everyone else all the time.
daedrdev · 6h ago
"Dune: Imperium" for a more competitive and strategic game (there are several board games for dune but they only share the theme, don't get confused)
Wingspan if you don't want to be aggressive against other players
Cascadia for shorter game that supports low player counts
Azul is another shorter game
The isle of cats is a personal favorite, very neat game about packing cats on your boat
Red Rising has an excellent board game if you've ever read the book.
dapperdrake · 1h ago
Space Alert (very interactive)
Kind-of a board game: 7th continent
stoneman24 · 5h ago
I recently joined a board game club after many years away from the hobby.
I’ll echo the recommendations above. Scored wins in Azul and Loot. Played Isle of cats and Wingspan.
Games around the 3-4 players seem to have best flow and pace. I may buy wyrm (sister game to wingspan) just for the card designs.
I did play a game of Twilight Imperium for 12 hours, which I won. Mostly newbie’s but with a host who’s provided guidance on the rules. Great fun but perhaps something to work up to.
daedrdev · 4h ago
I agree on the 3-4 player idea, more players is hard because people have too much downtime. I enjoy and have played several games of Twilight Imperium but you need a good group who are willing to play fair even if the game is hopeless for themselves.
reducesuffering · 8h ago
It's designed better for 4 players. In that case, 3 other players directing all 7 robbers and knight robbers to the clear lead really acts as a negative feedback loop to counter any snowball. That's not nearly as possible from just 1 behind player
A naïvely constructed die - i.e. a perfect cube, but with pips dug out for each face - will already bias in favor of 6 rolls and away from 1 rolls simply because six pips require removing more material (and therefore mass) than one pip. Likewise with 5/2 and 4/3. The "precision" dice used in e.g. casinos address this by filling in the pips with material exactly as dense as the die's base material; the injection-molded dice in most board games (let alone wooden dice) obviously ain't constructed with that level of care.
This is also part of the reason why some dice games - particularly those typically played with cheap dice - deem 1 to be more valuable than 6 (example: Farkle) or require at least one 1 roll to win (example: 1-4-24). Or they'll require some number of high dice to make the game ever-so-slightly less brutal (example: Ship-Captain-Crew).
I think that’s one of the reasons GMs sometimes make a high roll from the player into a punishment. Especially by asking for the roll first and telling what they were looking for after. It’s a way to balance out the consequences of unintentionally loaded dice.
If the player used the same dice for all rolls, a balance check against biased or loaded die was therefore built directly into the game, with the perk of making it very obvious if a player was using specific dice for specific rolls
Also, if someone is obviously cheating with a loaded die at an RPG game, they're not the kind of player that should be invited back. Most characters have ways of increasing their modifiers to rolls that matter most to them (My current ranger is 1d20 +16 for Perception), and having high-enough base numbers can mean that anything other than a natural 1 is usually some kind of success.
"You should probably know that this was a load-bearing pillar."
- How dense is the wood?
- How much wood does each pip remove?
- How much water does the wood absorb per unit of volume?
- Are any capillary effects at play transferring absorbed water into the rest of the die?
- Is it better to soak the 6 side to take advantage of more surface area? Or the 1 side to take advantage of more soakable volume?
- Is the wood even uniformly dense to begin with?
The best way I’ve found to mitigate this is to have a bag of assorted dice with the set. The various sizes and materials, with a swap out at every game, makes sure the dice bias isn’t predictable.
Regarding dice decks. I find they make the game sterile. A near perfect bell curve means you can anticipate number droughts or floods, aiding in robber strategy.
This is somewhat mitigated with cards that require you to reshuffle the deck. Even with shuffle cards included the numbers are too evenly distributed or balanced removing any feeling of randomness or luck from the game.
Feels like it's in their best interest to have a "fair" game where they skim some percentage of odds off the top.
A lot of the effective value of a casino is gamblers ruin -- gamblers stop betting when they run out of money, but the house can't run out of money. If the game has sufficient variance and the players are not aware of the bias, then the house still wins.
It's not hard to imagine ways to get cheated out of a "fair" bet in card games, roulette, slots, etc. whether it's a mechanical cheat, sleight of hand, adjustment of odds, or whatever. Not saying it happens or is even a common occurrence but it's very easy to imagine ways it COULD happen or has happened in the past that are impossible for the player to detect.
Craps is the only game it feels like to me where provided the payout odds used are the same standard you see everywhere and the dice aren't metallic there is virtually no way to cheat the player/a bet in a way that wouldn't also benefit another player/another bet.
That said, when organized crime gets involved, somebody always thinks "if I rig this, I'll do EVEN BETTER!" Maybe they're a corrupt employee skimming from the house, maybe they're a loyal employee skimming for the house, but unless you have something like the Nevada Gaming Control Board forcing fairness on them, you basically never get it. At least, from what I've read on the subject. Source: I've read some books on card counting & otherwise beating the odds in casinos, and this my vague memory.
And it's ironic that the house wants to rig games, because a biased game means a mathematically savvy individual can go in and calculate how results differ from "fair" games, and can then skim some profits for themselves if the bias is larger than the house advantage.
Also there's the scenario of an employee colluding with a player.
In settlers, trade is always important… getting an early lead can get you ganged up on. At least in my experience, the best way to win is to look like you are in second place, line things up (get close to some crucial port for example) and then rocket past the Designated Villain only when doing so will get you a really solid lead.
This, or the process of loading the dice was simply not very effective.
Even with the forced shuffle cards, the outcomes fall too much in the bell curve and make the game feel sterile. Because if you get a flood of 5’s and 6’s you know a drought is soon upon you.
It's like Risk but you submit each round's actions in advance and they are resolved simultaneously, rather than turn-by-turn. All of the action is off the board, not on it. Coalition-building, intelligence gathering and managing trust—even when betrayal is inevitable.
I learned a lot from that game.
At least with games like chess, you might be down but you still have some hope of coming back with some maneuvering.
Maybe what I didn't like was the parallels with life. There's not usually a rabbit in the hat to come out on top, the rich just get richer.
Monopoly feels like the game might take 4 hours but you know 20 minutes in that you're hopelessly behind and cannot come back. Then it's just 3 hours and 40 minutes of torture.
If you're doomed to lose the game should be over quick.
> The history of Monopoly can be traced back to 1903,[1][8] when American anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie created a game called The Landlord's Game that she hoped would explain the single-tax theory of Henry George as laid out in his book Progress and Poverty. It was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies. She took out a patent in 1904. Her game was self-published beginning in 1906.[9][10]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)
I think most people are in this situation in life, but would disagree with you. The game itself was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies, hard to get the message when it's over quickly.
The good one was intended to demonstrate a better alternative.
For what it's worth, if you play Monopoly by the actual rules, and you don't act stupidly stingy on your trade offers, a 4-player game of Monopoly shouldn't take more than 30-45 minutes.
The problem is, people of course don't like losing, and everybody loves a comeback story. So people play with house rules that constantly inject extra money into the game, which prolongs the game's purpose: For all the wealth to consolidate to a single player.
House rules in Monopoly are so common that a lot of people don't even realize they're playing house rules!
Do you give money for landing on Free Parking? You're playing a house rule.
Do you give $400 instead of $200 for LANDING on Go? You're playing a house rule.
Do you allow purchasing Hotels when there aren't enough houses? Do you allow building to not be even? Do you use some sort of object to act like a hotel because the game only comes with 12 hotels in the box? You're playing house rules. The fact there are only 12 hotels and 32 houses was a deliberate design choice to force players to trade and allow one player to horde all the houses and hotels.
You can't mortgage properties that have buildings on them. You must sell the buildings first, and you only get half of what you paid for them from the bank. When you unmortage, you have to pay an extra 10% fee. You don't collect rent on mortgaged properties. If you play any differently, you're playing a house rule.
Rolling doubles 3 times sends you to jail. That's actually NOT a house rule!
Speaking of jail, you DO still collect rent while in it! This means that deliberately staying in jail can actually be a strategic move if another player is possibly about to land on your dark Green properties (Baltic, North Carolina, Pennsylvania) while your opponent owns the Oranges, which you're likely to land on immediately after leaving jail.
Don't get me wrong, Monopoly is a shitty game for many reasons, but "Games take 2+ hours" is not one of them unless you're playing it wrong.
Even the one on the NES is totally fine.
Rules enforced without having to remember them, auctions run for you, nobody has to be the banker, no manual book-keeping for how much is owed where and mortgage status and all that.
Plays so much faster and smoother than the real thing, and no dumb house rules making it last forever for no good reason.
In Settlers there are actually strategies and "luck" is more evenly distributed. You can vary your approach or strategy - ex: by focusing on upgrading to cities as early as possible to give you 2x advantage, regardless of starting locations.
Parallel to life: birth location determines most of luck in life (opportunities, income, connections, friends), but you can increase this advantage by moving, within certain constraints (education, visa, marriage, etc.). Nevertheless, luck is certainly the most important factor.
In a better and not broken world, laws (rules of the game) will try to avoid the 1st and reflect the later. Ex: antitrust, immigration, affirmative action, etc.
Like another commentor said, the intended fix for this in Settlers is social dynamics: the leader is going to be blocked from the best settling spots, isn't going to get favorable trade deals, and is going to get hammered by the robber. The key strategic gameplay in Settlers is not about profit maximization (that's pretty easy to do), it's about minimizing any appearance that you're a threat until it's too late to do anything about it. If players never collaborate to take down the leader, then early gains can definitely beget later gains.
Pandemic Legacy for one of the best experiences you'll have with the same group of friends over months (cooperative, play through once over 12-24 sittings). The game builds in complexity as you play so it starts reasonably simple (though the first season starts with the basic ruleset of Pandemic so if you've played that it's a head start but not necessary).
Kingdomino and Cascadia for quicker terrain building games, I consider these fairly similar though Kingdomino is quicker and simpler. These I can play with anyone.
Paperback if you already like word games like Scrabble etc, and want to dip into playing a deck building game.
The Crew if you like trick-taking card games, it's a co-op variant to games like Bridge or Euchre.
Carcassone is an oldie but goodie. Very social compared to many competitive games, as though it's turn based everyone wants to have their say for what you should do with your piece. Compared to e.g. Wingspan where you're largely ignoring/out of the loop for what's going on with everyone else all the time.
Wingspan if you don't want to be aggressive against other players
Cascadia for shorter game that supports low player counts
Azul is another shorter game
The isle of cats is a personal favorite, very neat game about packing cats on your boat
Red Rising has an excellent board game if you've ever read the book.
Kind-of a board game: 7th continent
Games around the 3-4 players seem to have best flow and pace. I may buy wyrm (sister game to wingspan) just for the card designs.
I did play a game of Twilight Imperium for 12 hours, which I won. Mostly newbie’s but with a host who’s provided guidance on the rules. Great fun but perhaps something to work up to.