My experience differs. I find the game offers plenty of ways to recover from an early bad placement, and that while a bad run of luck can hurt you, your choice

My experience differs. I find the game offers plenty of ways to recover from an early bad placement, and that while a bad run of luck can hurt you, your choices over the course of the game have a bigger impact. (It's true that if you get the initial placement wrong enough you're pretty much screwed for the rest of the game, but I don't often observe that happening except to first-time players, so I try to help newbies set up. One exception is when a couple of players deliberately box you into a corner at the start so you can't expand, but I don't see that happen much.) What I find interesting about Settlers is that while every player is susceptible to chance, you can control how much so. You can choose to bet strongly on certain resources or strategies, or try and spread yourself around so that most rolls of the dice get you something and you can gain points in multiple ways. I hear good poker players sometimes lose hands purely due to a run of bad luck, but if you think poker is "largely all due to luck", you're probably doing it wrong.