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CATAN BOARD SETUP GENERATOR SERIES

The last player gets to put his two settlements one right after another, removing all the uncertainties other players have to deal with when deciding where to put their settlements.

The first player has the most options for the first settlement but may end up being blocked or left with poor choices for the second settlement.

This way of playing directly translate in the following: The second settlement-road placement plays similarly but in reverse player order, the players also collect one resource card per tile surrounding this second settlement.Įxample of initial player settlement selection What is a truly fair (or unfair) board, however, is not easy to determine… The initial game setupĪt the start of the game, playing one after the other, the players put one settlement on the island with an attached road segment. Right away, I will make an important distinction.Ī balanced Catan board is a board where resources and probabilities are equally distributed on the board and the probabilities equally distributed among resources.Ī fair Catan board is a board where all players have an equal chance of selecting good starting positions, no matter in which order they play, consequently offering them similar chances to win the game. This should offer a way to predict, or measure, which boards are fair or unfair, and see if we can modify the Catan island balance index to add an element of fairness to it! Are some initial board setups unfair?

We will have a look at balanced and unbalanced Catan boards to see how they are related to a fair board.

I will add resources and harbors considerations to the mix.

I will then add a few strategic considerations to see if the benefits vary according to player play styles.By considering only the expected card return, we should be able to clearly see if there is an expected payout advantage in playing first.In today’s post, I will start by examining a simplified version of the fairness problem: So I will examine if the order of play benefits some players over the others, depending on the initial board setup.ĭoes being the first player in Catan offers a real game advantage? The goal here is to try to understand what makes a board fair. Those are the questions I’ll try to answer now. Are “balanced boards” also “fair boards”?.Are some setups unfairly advantageous to some players?.Ready to build some settlements? We'll explore game play on the next page.But I did not answer some important questions: This way, players can judge by the pips which terrains are most likely to give up the goods. A 4 tile, for instance, bears three out of a possible six pips because there's an overall 8 percent chance of rolling that number on two dice.

CATAN BOARD SETUP GENERATOR SERIES

The series of pips merely refer to the probability of that number coming up. If a player gets a 4, only terrains with a 4 token yield anything to the people with settlements or cities bordering them. The letter pertains to game setup, but the number relates to the number rolled.

You'll also spy a small, circular number token with a number, a letter and a series of pips (dots) sitting atop each nondesert terrain tile. The players scoop them up to build roads, settlements and ultimately cities. Forests yield lumber, pastures generate wool, fields give up grain, hills produce bricks and mountains supply ore. Except for desert, each one produces a natural resource. Six terrain types make up Catan: forest, pasture, fields, hills, mountains and desert.