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 · 2h 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.
hinkley · 1h 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.
gigaflop · 1h 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 · 38m 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 · 1h 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."
GavinMcG · 2h ago
Is the bias from having more or fewer pips just as strong as the bias introduced by the water?
yellowapple · 1h 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 · 3h 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.
hinkley · 1h 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.
vunderba · 2h 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 · 2h 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.
thatnerd · 2h 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.
andrewla · 1h 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 · 24m 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.
hnfong · 2h ago
Cheaters might be able to sneak in some loaded dice, so the dice being easy to inspect is good for the house.
praptak · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h ago
Saturate the cup of water with salt so the dice float, then just roll the dice in the water
hiccuphippo · 2h 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.
vunderba · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
bell-cot · 1h 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 · 43m 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 · 48m ago
Good point, hadn't thought about that. Probably why they don't sell it anymore.
zaik · 2h 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.
charlieyu1 · 2h ago
I’m not sure how much I trusted the data, surely the water would have been dried over a week
xivzgrev · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 51m ago
Settlers of Catan explicitly requires 3 players, in fact. I'm not terribly surprised it doesn't work great with 2.
jbverschoor · 1h ago
Yeah I’m so sick of getting bashed haha
cycomanic · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 40m 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.
mgh2 · 1h 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.
snarf21 · 58m 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 · 18m ago
Would you recommend a few that are beginner friendly and available at my local board game shop?
reducesuffering · 1h 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.
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?
Feels like it's in their best interest to have a "fair" game where they skim some percentage of odds off the top.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.