5 ms·

You could just use a deck of cards with numbers on them. That's the simplest way to do "Gambler's Fallacy Dice" IRL. For example, there's a popular Catan expa

by Pxtl 9y ago

You could just use a deck of cards with numbers on them. That's the simplest way to do "Gambler's Fallacy Dice" IRL. For example, there's a popular Catan expansion pack that replaces the dice with a deck of cards with numbers on them for just this reason, because in Catan each roll of 2D6 represents different regions of the map paying out so if a number never comes up it never pays out.

jjnoakes 9y ago
There's a little randomness in the Catan deck of cards: the bottom 5 cards of every shuffle are not used. Not as much as dice, but also not a guarantee for certain numbers to come up a certain amount.
thefifthsetpin 9y ago
One of our first house rules for Catan was to introduce a deck. Not quite sure why they went with dice for that game; the deck eliminates a lot of boring games. Some purists insist that they role dice, so we just let 'em and the resulting game feels quite like you're using gambler's dice.
andy_wrote 9y ago
I've never played in real life with the deck, but I first came across this version on a software version of Catan I had (I think Xbox?). I really enjoyed it and my guess is that in real life it adds a substantial angle to negotiating placement of the robber. In particular, bribing people to put/not put the robber in a given location - if the deck is 7-heavy or your good squares are already drawn, no big deal.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  I don't think I'd want to start having to count cards in order to play Settlers well, in addition to keeping track of players' hands.
acomjean 9y ago
The thing about rolling 2D6, is the distribution isn't even. I'm not sure that factors into the game (have played but its been a while). Cards seem like a more controlled way to distribute the results with some randomness. only one way to get a 12 (6+6) but 7 much more likely.. (6+1, 5+2, 4+3, 3+4, 2+5, 1+6) as someone who played a bit of online backgammon back in the day, We always suspected the random dice rolls behaved differently in the game than playing in real life...
- xeonoex 9y ago
  Catan takes the distribution into account, and is pretty up front about it (There are dots on the numbers that represent the probability). I've played a lot of games of Catan and, every once in a while, you'll have a statistically unprobable game where 11 is rolled 10-15 times, but 6 is only rolled 3 times the whole game.
  - marcofiset 9y ago
    That's exactly what the pack of cards is designed to solve. With the cards it's guaranteed that the 6-7-8 will show up more often than everything else.
- Pxtl 9y ago
  If you look at the Catan number-circles that you use use to mark the tiles with their roll, they have a set of dots on them - 6 and 8 have 5 dots, while 2 and 12 have 1 dot. The dot is the numerator over 36 of its probability. Likewise, if you use the Traders and Barbarians dice-deck, the same thing applies - there are 5X as many 6s and 8s in the deck as there are 2s and 12s.
- speeder 9y ago
  Catan cards take that in account. They basically made one card for each possiblity of pair of dices, so there is a 7 card for 6+1, another for 5+2, and so on... Playing with it is MUCH better than with dice... when I played with the dice that came with my copy with catan, the dice were clearly defective (rolls weren't just random-looking, they were WILDLY wrong, it rolled 10s 2 times the amount of 7s...), and the game was super boring, it would end with everyone having the same materials and not having others, so not even trade would fix the game, we had stuff like 10 turns in a row where noone had one particular item while the 'bank' ran out of the other items because everyone had lots of them.

by Pxtl 9y ago

jjnoakes 9y ago

There's a little randomness in the Catan deck of cards: the bottom 5 cards of every shuffle are not used. Not as much as dice, but also not a guarantee for certain numbers to come up a certain amount.

thefifthsetpin 9y ago

One of our first house rules for Catan was to introduce a deck. Not quite sure why they went with dice for that game; the deck eliminates a lot of boring games. Some purists insist that they role dice, so we just let 'em and the resulting game feels quite like you're using gambler's dice.

andy_wrote 9y ago

I've never played in real life with the deck, but I first came across this version on a software version of Catan I had (I think Xbox?). I really enjoyed it and my guess is that in real life it adds a substantial angle to negotiating placement of the robber. In particular, bribing people to put/not put the robber in a given location - if the deck is 7-heavy or your good squares are already drawn, no big deal.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
pavel_lishin 9y ago
I don't think I'd want to start having to count cards in order to play Settlers well, in addition to keeping track of players' hands.

acomjean 9y ago

The thing about rolling 2D6, is the distribution isn't even. I'm not sure that factors into the game (have played but its been a while). Cards seem like a more controlled way to distribute the results with some randomness. only one way to get a 12 (6+6) but 7 much more likely.. (6+1, 5+2, 4+3, 3+4, 2+5, 1+6) as someone who played a bit of online backgammon back in the day, We always suspected the random dice rolls behaved differently in the game than playing in real life...

xeonoex 9y ago
Catan takes the distribution into account, and is pretty up front about it (There are dots on the numbers that represent the probability). I've played a lot of games of Catan and, every once in a while, you'll have a statistically unprobable game where 11 is rolled 10-15 times, but 6 is only rolled 3 times the whole game.
- marcofiset 9y ago
  That's exactly what the pack of cards is designed to solve. With the cards it's guaranteed that the 6-7-8 will show up more often than everything else.
Pxtl 9y ago
If you look at the Catan number-circles that you use use to mark the tiles with their roll, they have a set of dots on them - 6 and 8 have 5 dots, while 2 and 12 have 1 dot. The dot is the numerator over 36 of its probability. Likewise, if you use the Traders and Barbarians dice-deck, the same thing applies - there are 5X as many 6s and 8s in the deck as there are 2s and 12s.
speeder 9y ago
Catan cards take that in account. They basically made one card for each possiblity of pair of dices, so there is a 7 card for 6+1, another for 5+2, and so on... Playing with it is MUCH better than with dice... when I played with the dice that came with my copy with catan, the dice were clearly defective (rolls weren't just random-looking, they were WILDLY wrong, it rolled 10s 2 times the amount of 7s...), and the game was super boring, it would end with everyone having the same materials and not having others, so not even trade would fix the game, we had stuff like 10 turns in a row where noone had one particular item while the 'bank' ran out of the other items because everyone had lots of them.