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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 mor

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.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  In Catan can't you trade any 4 identical resources for any one other resource? It slows down resource acquisition but should eliminate the situation you describe!?
  - speeder 9y ago
    You can, but if I remember the resource noone had was bricks, that is very important... So the game pace slowed to a crawl... Also, the funky dice never rolling bricks meant people would quickly rack up random resources, sometimes like 3 of each, so they ended with 9 cards, and would then lose to robber rolls (7). Then of course in one game where this happened there was an asshole cousin that thought it would be hilarious to hog resources and make the game worse, he would spend his whole turn making 'negotiations' with everyone, and them cancelling them, wasting like 5 minutes every time it was his turn, and sometimes if 7 was taking long enough have 20 cards on his hand... We don't play with that cousin anymore either. But yeah, not having a way to build roads make the game suuuuuper slow.
LeifCarrotson 9y ago
It very much does factor into Catan. Not only are there no spaces marked "7", which is instead used for a special type of result, the probability of the remaining rolls are described graphically on the number tokens: http://www.catan.com/files/styles/lightboxy/public/gallery/dye_catan_150618_0650.jpg?itok=9RJRSUjI http://www.catan.com/files/styles/lightboxy/public/gallery/d... Notice that the 12 has one dot, the 9 (6+3, 5+4, 4+5, 3+6) has 4 dots, and the 3 (2+1, 1+2) has 2 dots. The gray robber piece is sitting on a red number token, which is either a 6 or an 8 and has 5 dots because it is more likely to be rolled. In the game, you develop your pieces with the hopes of getting resources based on the adjacent numbers being rolled. It definitely creates a lot of stress in some people when "eights are being rolled all the time this game but never sixes!" or "your stupid 10 keeps getting rolled when it shouldn't, that's not fair!" I think I'll give it a try tonight with some numbered cards. I just threw some together in Excel: 1-6 in B1-G1, 1-6 in A2-A7, and the formula =B$1&" + "&$A2&" = "&(B$1+$A2) spread across the grid and printed that out, but on doing a little, ah, market research, it looks like you can buy official Catan decks like this at https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameexpansion/20038/catan-event-cards https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameexpansion/20038/catan-eve.... Or download this: https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/40420/deck-dice-separate-cards https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/40420/deck-dice-separate-... (note: not the above). Or someone else pointed out that you can simulate it with two matching decks of cards with: one 2 two 3S three 4S four 5S five 6S six 7S five 8S four 9S three 10S two Jacks one Queen Other market research says that people start counting cards to see when their numbers are going to come up again....perhaps some compromise, with perhaps two or three such decks? Real dice are an approximation of an infinite number of shuffled decks of dice, and I imagine you'd go through on the order of 100 'cards' in a given game, so with more than 3 or 4 decks you could end up with certain cards/numbers that never appeared, which seems to happen frequently and cause ire in games with real dice...interesting. Science is required! Sorry for rambling/thinking out loud.
hoytech 9y ago
As I'm sure you know, understanding this distribution is critical to good backgammon play. For example, all else being equal it's better to leave your exposed blots closer to a threatening opponent checker than further away (within 6 pips of course). Also, you need to account for rolling doubles which results in the counter-intuitive average pip value of a roll being 49/6 (~8.16). An interesting bit of trivia: In roman times it seems they played with 3 dice instead of 2: http://www.bkgm.com/variants/Tabula.html http://www.bkgm.com/variants/Tabula.html

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.

pbhjpbhj 9y ago
In Catan can't you trade any 4 identical resources for any one other resource? It slows down resource acquisition but should eliminate the situation you describe!?
- speeder 9y ago
  You can, but if I remember the resource noone had was bricks, that is very important... So the game pace slowed to a crawl... Also, the funky dice never rolling bricks meant people would quickly rack up random resources, sometimes like 3 of each, so they ended with 9 cards, and would then lose to robber rolls (7). Then of course in one game where this happened there was an asshole cousin that thought it would be hilarious to hog resources and make the game worse, he would spend his whole turn making 'negotiations' with everyone, and them cancelling them, wasting like 5 minutes every time it was his turn, and sometimes if 7 was taking long enough have 20 cards on his hand... We don't play with that cousin anymore either. But yeah, not having a way to build roads make the game suuuuuper slow.

LeifCarrotson 9y ago

It very much does factor into Catan. Not only are there no spaces marked "7", which is instead used for a special type of result, the probability of the remaining rolls are described graphically on the number tokens: http://www.catan.com/files/styles/lightboxy/public/gallery/dye_catan_150618_0650.jpg?itok=9RJRSUjI http://www.catan.com/files/styles/lightboxy/public/gallery/d... Notice that the 12 has one dot, the 9 (6+3, 5+4, 4+5, 3+6) has 4 dots, and the 3 (2+1, 1+2) has 2 dots. The gray robber piece is sitting on a red number token, which is either a 6 or an 8 and has 5 dots because it is more likely to be rolled. In the game, you develop your pieces with the hopes of getting resources based on the adjacent numbers being rolled. It definitely creates a lot of stress in some people when "eights are being rolled all the time this game but never sixes!" or "your stupid 10 keeps getting rolled when it shouldn't, that's not fair!" I think I'll give it a try tonight with some numbered cards. I just threw some together in Excel: 1-6 in B1-G1, 1-6 in A2-A7, and the formula =B$1&" + "&$A2&" = "&(B$1+$A2) spread across the grid and printed that out, but on doing a little, ah, market research, it looks like you can buy official Catan decks like this at https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameexpansion/20038/catan-event-cards https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameexpansion/20038/catan-eve.... Or download this: https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/40420/deck-dice-separate-cards https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/40420/deck-dice-separate-... (note: not the above). Or someone else pointed out that you can simulate it with two matching decks of cards with: one 2 two 3S three 4S four 5S five 6S six 7S five 8S four 9S three 10S two Jacks one Queen Other market research says that people start counting cards to see when their numbers are going to come up again....perhaps some compromise, with perhaps two or three such decks? Real dice are an approximation of an infinite number of shuffled decks of dice, and I imagine you'd go through on the order of 100 'cards' in a given game, so with more than 3 or 4 decks you could end up with certain cards/numbers that never appeared, which seems to happen frequently and cause ire in games with real dice...interesting. Science is required! Sorry for rambling/thinking out loud.

hoytech 9y ago

As I'm sure you know, understanding this distribution is critical to good backgammon play. For example, all else being equal it's better to leave your exposed blots closer to a threatening opponent checker than further away (within 6 pips of course). Also, you need to account for rolling doubles which results in the counter-intuitive average pip value of a roll being 49/6 (~8.16). An interesting bit of trivia: In roman times it seems they played with 3 dice instead of 2: http://www.bkgm.com/variants/Tabula.html http://www.bkgm.com/variants/Tabula.html