3 ms·

I can finally beat my in-laws at this game this holiday season!

logfromblammo 9y ago
Skilled players can beat unskilled players regardless of the bias of the dice. It doesn't matter if you get 5-15 more brick cards if it's an ore game. And how do you keep the other players from building on the bias-favored numbers? If you're going to cheat, you're better off sleeving your most critical resource cards, to protect them from 7-rolls, soldiers, and monopoly cards taking them from your hand. You unsleeve and swap when you get a favorable resource roll, and hope nobody is OP enough to keep a running total of all opponent resources in their head.
- rockostrich 9y ago
  The problem is, how do you know those numbers are bias-favored if your sample size is a few dice rolls? And if there is a bias in those few dice rolls, there's no guarantee it will continue. Sure, a more skilled player will always beat a much less skilled player, but the randomness of the dice certainly closes the skill gap. It's much different than a game like Agricola or Dominion where you're playing 100% against what the other people do and not relying on the outcomes of 4 dice rolls to determine what you want to do on your turn.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    The randomness of the board set up partially cancels the bias you introduce into the dice. There are 20 different possible numeric token layouts, and each of those has trillions of different possible tile combinations. You really have no practical way of knowing in advance which resource tiles will be under the number tokens you have biased for by loading the dice. So cheating in this fashion doesn't really provide that much of an advantage over the other players. Since the intentional cheating is scientifically indistinguishable from randomness, all good players will already be able to compensate for unfavorable variations in die rolls.
    - logfromblammo 9y ago
      It's actually ( 12864852000 * 20 ) possible board combinations. Not quite trillions; more like a quarter of a trillion.

Skilled players can beat unskilled players regardless of the bias of the dice. It doesn't matter if you get 5-15 more brick cards if it's an ore game. And how do you keep the other players from building on the bias-favored numbers? If you're going to cheat, you're better off sleeving your most critical resource cards, to protect them from 7-rolls, soldiers, and monopoly cards taking them from your hand. You unsleeve and swap when you get a favorable resource roll, and hope nobody is OP enough to keep a running total of all opponent resources in their head.

rockostrich 9y ago
The problem is, how do you know those numbers are bias-favored if your sample size is a few dice rolls? And if there is a bias in those few dice rolls, there's no guarantee it will continue. Sure, a more skilled player will always beat a much less skilled player, but the randomness of the dice certainly closes the skill gap. It's much different than a game like Agricola or Dominion where you're playing 100% against what the other people do and not relying on the outcomes of 4 dice rolls to determine what you want to do on your turn.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  The randomness of the board set up partially cancels the bias you introduce into the dice. There are 20 different possible numeric token layouts, and each of those has trillions of different possible tile combinations. You really have no practical way of knowing in advance which resource tiles will be under the number tokens you have biased for by loading the dice. So cheating in this fashion doesn't really provide that much of an advantage over the other players. Since the intentional cheating is scientifically indistinguishable from randomness, all good players will already be able to compensate for unfavorable variations in die rolls.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    It's actually ( 12864852000 * 20 ) possible board combinations. Not quite trillions; more like a quarter of a trillion.