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How to cheat at settlers by loading the dice (2017)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- n2d4 1y agoAn 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.
- brookst 1y agoProbably equally fun to tell people you’re doing that, and use completely fair dice.
- vunderba 1y agoTangentially 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 1y agoInteresting 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.
- hnfong 1y agoCheaters might be able to sneak in some loaded dice, so the dice being easy to inspect is good for the house.
- praptak 1y agoIt 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.
- thatnerd 1y agoFor 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 1y agoA 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 1y agoIt'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.
- misja111 1y agoFYI 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 1y agoSaturate the cup of water with salt so the dice float, then just roll the dice in the water
- yellowapple 1y agoIs soaking the dice even necessary? 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).
- GavinMcG 1y agoIs the bias from having more or fewer pips just as strong as the bias introduced by the water?
- yellowapple 1y agoDepends 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?
- GavinMcG 1y agoIndeed. But given the ratios between the other five numbers and the waterlogged six, do you think it’s even remotely plausible that the water isn’t doing anything? For it to not be necessary, you’d expect that the die comes pre-loaded.
- burch45 1y agoYes. 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.
- bee_rider 1y agoThis 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 1y agoJust 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.
- charlieyu1 1y agoI’m not sure how much I trusted the data, surely the water would have been dried over a week
- zaik 1y 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.
- hiccuphippo 1y agoI 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.
- cde-v 1y agoThat 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 1y agoWith 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.
- cde-v 1y agoGood point, hadn't thought about that. Probably why they don't sell it anymore.
- hiccuphippo 1y agoThe 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.
- mechanicum 1y agoThey bundled it into the Traders & Barbarians expansion.
- vunderba 1y agoInteresting - 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.
- hinkley 1y agoI 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.
- c22 1y agoOne time my buddy Mike cleaned up a game of settlers by focusing his entire empire around a '2' tile. We rolled snake eyes dozens of times during that game. We used the same dice every time we played (once a week for over a decade) and never had another game like that one.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- internet_points 1y agotell me you worked at meta without telling me you worked at meta ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43781010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43781010 )
- hinkley 1y agoI heard about that in the book. He had his own issues though.
- xivzgrev 1y agoSettlers 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.
- ben7799 1y agoI 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.
- soperj 1y ago> 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 1y agoYes, 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nothrabannosir 1y agoIn 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] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)
- dave333 1y agoAnother way to look at board games and sports in general is as an alternative to war - settling disputes in a non-violent way and building social cohesion in the process. In board games there are no real losers and in war there are no real winners. So a win at all costs strategy may not be necessary.
- CGMthrowaway 1y agoEver played Diplomacy? (correspondence board game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(game) It's like Risk but you submit each round's actions in advance and they are resolved simultaneously, rather than turn-by-turn. All of the action is off the board, not on it. Coalition-building, intelligence gathering and managing trust—even when betrayal is inevitable. I learned a lot from that game.
- robertlagrant 1y agoThat sounds like a speech someone would give on a video to his friends that he invited to a remote mansion to play lethal games with.
- CGMthrowaway 1y agoThat sounds fun :)
- FridayoLeary 1y agoI slowly learned when i started playing catan, that by playing against another player, you are virtually guaranteed to lose. You can only win if you cooperate with others. A valuable life lesson.
- asciimov 1y agoI’ve played a bunch of Catan. The included wooden dice are all terribly biased. Not in the same way, but enough that a sets owner knows, at least subconsciously, what numbers their set favors. The best way I’ve found to mitigate this is to have a bag of assorted dice with the set. The various sizes and materials, with a swap out at every game, makes sure the dice bias isn’t predictable. Regarding dice decks. I find they make the game sterile. A near perfect bell curve means you can anticipate number droughts or floods, aiding in robber strategy.
- brookst 1y agoExpand on that last? How would you anticipate a drought or flood from a bell curve? These are independent rolls… you’re not heading into gambler’s fallacy territory, are you?
- toast0 1y agoWith a dice deck, you no longer have independent rolls, and you can count cards. You could probably mitigate by shuffling early, like casinos do for blackjack.
- frollogaston 1y agoWhy would anyone even use a dice deck then, to stop people from complaining about the law of small numbers?
- sdwr 1y ago> dice decks
- asciimov 1y agoThe dice deck has a perfect bell curve of dice rolls, this means the same number of 6’s and 8’s, 4’s and 10’s. If you go on a tear you can pull most of the 6’s from the deck in short order, a flood. Making it difficult or impossible to pull anymore till the deck is reshuffled, the drought. Meanwhile the odds of pulling other cards go up. This is somewhat mitigated with cards that require you to reshuffle the deck. Even with shuffle cards included the numbers are too evenly distributed or balanced removing any feeling of randomness or luck from the game.
- redcobra762 1y agoThe "criticism" of a p-value was strange to me, because it's never taught to be an "end all" answer to a question, rather it's taught as a way of determining statistical significance. Every stats or economic analytics course I took in college explained that hypothesis rejection involved critical thinking in addition to p-value analysis.
- rtpg 1y agoI think so much about how Catan showed up, got really popular, and then more or less right after that two of its huge characteristics (open trading + dice rolls as the primary decider of things) have almost completely disappeared from modern game design. There's still dice rolls in some games of course, but open trading in particular feels like something that people really don't want in games anymore. And I totally get why
- volemo 1y ago> And I totally get why Why? Catan is one of my favourite boardgames.
- rtpg 1y agoCatan, like Monopoly (or I guess Cricket and Baseball) has am awkward interminable nature to it, especially at high player counts Long trading discussions are one component of this. The pure randomness of dice meaning that the internal economy can be all messed up for a while also plays into this There are games with more consistent runtimes that also don’t get bogged down by people with a high chatter:play ratio. I like hanging out with people to play games but Catan is in that category of game where just one overly annoying person can just make a session totally suck. I’d rather play something like Carcassonne or some other modern games that involve competition and territorial management like El Grande where I at least have an idea of how long it’ll take.
- horsawlarway 1y agoI also just don't think Catan is actually all that "fun" once you've played a couple of times. It's a decent intro board game because the mechanics aren't terribly complex, you don't have to manage too many pieces, and there's so much randomness that any given player can win if they're even vaguely trying. But that last bit is also its achilles heel - there's so much randomness that the strategy is basically ankle deep. It just becomes a session of "do I have friendly people at the table" or "can I cajole/harass people into bad trades". Neither of those are all that fun (at least to me). There are much better social games, and there are much better strategy games.
- jakemanger 1y agoThis is absolutely brilliant. What a patient wife!
- jakemanger 1y agoThinking about how this can be used to my advantage the next time I play Catan. I play with someone that wins almost every time and is a real dirty deal-maker (trades with you then blocks your path), so it would be good to get her back. Soak the dice to shift the most common to be 5 or 9 rather than 6 - 8? Is that possible?
- frollogaston 1y agoThis is neat, but I was expecting the soaking to affect the dice more. Is this enough to really affect how you play? The naughty and nice players had equal number of dots, but I feel like you usually have more uneven choices than that. Seems like it'd be more advantageous to make people over/underestimate the chance of being robbed, but this didn't affect the chance of a 7. Is that the same no matter which side you soak?
- BrenBarn 1y agoAssuming this article is sort of tongue-in-cheek, I'll add something in the same spirit: The fact that the number of rolls required for the game is too low to be able to detect the unfairness does not imply that "it’s scientifically impossible for our opponents to know that we’re cheating." That's fallacious reasoning. In any situation where people actually cared about this and suspected a cheat, they could just say "Let's stop the game for a bit, roll the dice a bunch of times, and run some tests". There's no requirement that the dice only be rolled when required for the game. (If you refused to allow the test, that would obviously be even more suspicious.)
- Rastonbury 1y agoIf parties are willing to roll the dice hundred or thousands of times and end up arguing about significance, the easier thing to do would be to bring a cup of water and roll them a couple of times in the water or load the water with salt till the dice float lol But yeah it's tongue in cheek, talking about bayesian probability for the water stains opposite the sixes
- NooneAtAll3 1y ago> the standard scientific protocol tells us to conclude that we have no “significant” evidence that the dice are biased. (Notice that this is subtly different from having evidence that the dice are not biased! Confusing these two statements is a common mistake, even for trained phd scientists, and especially for medical doctors.) but shouldn't it be "no significant evidence that the dice aren't unbiased"? that's different from either
- onionisafruit 1y agoYes. Leaving “significant” out of the second one leaves the impression the author is pointing out that non-significant evidence is still evidence. That distracts from the actual point that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”
- elif 1y agoIt's kinda funny that the magnitude of the effect of this "cheating" is significantly less than the magnitude of the effect of who goes first or second.