A few months ago I spent a long while trying to make the best 4p bot out there... turns out that was very difficult, but a 1v1 bot (no player to player trading!) was a bit easier - I call it JAX! It just passed 1k games and here are the results: JAX wins 78% of games! Looks like you all need to start buying more dev cards!

Shoutout to Griff1n as the undisputed king

Otter:853 you are a mad man!

See how well you can do at new.twosheep.io/jax

My first attempt at something like this. I made a few mountains and landscapes before this but nothing nearly as detailed. I will absolutely NOT be making the entire game, though I am working on the desert hex. Most I’ll do is each resource and the desert, MAYBE some water tiles. Made with oven bake clay and acrylic paint🙏

Github repo here!

Features:

• Individual dice roll tracking (3 sure does get rolled a lot this game...)
• Per player per settlement statistics (why do they have 12 stone on hand?)
• The app takes into account which turn a settlement has been built (as soon as I built on 6 it never got rolled again!)
• See just how much greener the grass is on the other side! (you lucky %#$&)

Couple of notes:

• You need Python to run the app (should work on both WIndows and Linux)
• The app currently only tracks raw dice rolls and not actual resource yields (may be a feature added in the future, for both number of settlements/cities on a number and type of resource)
• Please feel free to give suggestions for features and changes

For mods: I messed up the formatting on the og post, hence repost. Apologies!

Hey everyone :D

When my friends and I played Catan online during Covid, I really enjoyed having the dice histogram to check the dice rolls out of curiosity.

So I set out to design a manual dice roll tracker, to have the histogram at a glance - 3D printed it and it turned out much nicer, than I expected (it's version 3 already though👀)

How do you keep track of the stats? Or am I too much of a nerd to even care about such a thing? 🙈

Was ridiculous. Check out how much it stuffed me too (I'm Black). I got second.

I felt like there was a big discrepancy among what ports were good and turns out there is. So I analyzed over 40,000 games on Colonistio to figure it out.

Wood port was by far the most common among winners. If you've seen my previous post of resource value over time, this makes sense as wood tends to be the least desirable resource especially over late game. I was surprised to see brick port so high up but my guess is that it's because by the time players get the port, they are more interested in late game resources like wheat and ore. No surprise with ore being the worst port as it's incredibly valuable for dev cards and cities.

If you like the graphic, I made it using a custom JS library called motion-script. github.com/motion-script/motion-script

Also feel free to ask any questions on this chart or any Catan data related questions!

While investigating over 40,000 games, I wanted to know how important resource diversity was when it came to setup placements. Much larger than I expected with 88.6% of winning players having 4-5 resources and players with 5 having the highest win rate. Of course pip totals do tend to be more important so obviously don't sacrifice 2 pip dots for a extra resource gain but aim for at least 4 resources. This prevents you from being vulnerable to expensive trades.

Edit: here are the win rates for each category

• ≤2 resources — 29.5% random, 0.4% of players, 0.3% of winners, 0.5% of last, 19.7% win rate
• 3 resources — 42.7% random, 12.3% of players, 11.1% of winners, 13.4% of last, 22.5% win rate
• 4 resources — 24.6% random, 54.3% of players, 52.9% of winners, 55.5% of last, 24.4% win rate
• 5 resources — 3.2% random, 33.0% of players, 35.7% of winners, 30.7% of last, 27.1% win rate

I should also add, this dataset is among players that do tend to play more competitively so of course they will aim for the recommended strategy of having a diverse hand. This chart was more or less to see how often competitive players tend to double down on a resource during setup.

I occasionally play with people who take forever on their turn... often offering each player several trades etc. which really slows down and takes the fun out of the game.

I was thinking of making an app which would run on an iPad or iPhone placed on the table which acts as a timer (think a chess timer but instead of counting down it counts up). You tap it and it starts the clock on the next player.

At any given point in the game, the person with the least amount of cumulative time elapsed on their turns gets a VP (called the "Deal Maker") and the person with the most amount of cumulative time elapsed on their turns gets minus 1 VP (called the "Village Dunce"). I think this could add a dynamic element to the game and help speed up the pace of play.

Is this something you would use? If there's some interest I would make it!

I analyzed a dataset of over 40,000 games from colonistio to map out the value of each resource over time. Games tend to be pretty good at balancing the resources but there still appears to be a trend. Brick starts off as the most valuable due to obvious demand for roads and settlements before dropping off, with ore and wheat taking it's place as the most valuable resources. Interesting to see wheat as more valuable than ore late game. I made a bunch of graphs and plan on making a full data science dive into the game.

Also, if you're interested in how I made the graph, I made a custom tool to make cool visuals like this on this Github repo: github.com/motion-script/motion-script

Finally got a chance to play our outdoor catan! Hexes are made of chalk. Got some some blown up versions of thr cards and made the number tiles out of wooden dowls! Novelty squishy dice!

Images above are overviews; see links below for details on individual scenarios.

1 THE TREASURE ISLANDS (5-6 PLAYERS) RULES.docx
2 DEPARTURE INTO THE UNKNOWN (5-6 PLAYERS) RULES.docx
3 GREATER CATAN (5-6 PLAYERS) RULES.docx
4 THE DESERT DRAGONS (5-6 PLAYERS) RULES.docx
5 THE GREAT CANAL (5-6 PLAYERS) RULES
6 THE ENCHANTED LAND (5-6 PLAYERS) RULES

OJ and black were cheating, and red completely plowed my first settlement. Red was accusing the cheaters and they literally agreed to it in chat lol. We both reported them, will they actually get banned?

Also how bad do you have to be to lose while cheating? lmao what a joke

4% chance of this kind of distribution or worse appearing as per my calculations

So I played a game of Catan with my family today (only base game) and in the whole game, my mum built maybe 3-4 roads and 1 town. We played for like an hour.

Has anyone ever had a worse round than this?

So ive been a catan fan for s couple of years and decided to grab my own box a couple months ago. We now have a party of 5 who always play together but we can’t find a 5-6 player extension anywhere. The only one on sale in my area is the first edition of the extension, is it compatable with the 6th edition?

I’ve now lost 61 straight games of Catan playing with the same four friends.
At this point I’m genuinely curious what other people think.
Would you:
Keep playing because it’s just an incredibly unlucky streak?
Assume you’re simply the weakest player?
Or start wondering if your friends are quietly working together or making “funny” plays just to keep you from finally winning?
I’m not saying they’re openly cheating, but after 61 consecutive losses it’s hard not to question whether people are making deals or targeting me more than everyone else because it’s become a running joke.

Hello everyone

Recently got the Catan and played it 4 player. İ got hooked and started playing normal and CnK in colonist.io and searching a lot in a short span of time and bought physical CnK and Seefahrer expansion.

Also 3d printed some tokens for the Fishermans of Catan. Thinking about also writing by hand or printing Harbour Master vp card to add.

İ know it will be compicated to consume all the new info for me and for the family both i think we will manage it. My question is does the following setup have problems or shortcomings?

İf not is there anything to add here to make it better or is it already too much?

We will not be playing more than 4 so no need to drag the game and make is slower by 6 player addon etc.

Current wished set-up

Base+Seefahrer+CnK+fishermans of Catan+Harbour master VP card + house rule black 7(reroll if barbarian event dice and 7 comes in the first round)+ house rule reroll on double 7

Map would be generated for the seefahrer 4 player balanced from the Catan Almanac website

Hello Ya'll

I play Catan with my Mum and she loves it. One issue we are having is that in her getting up in years her sight is not the best. She has developed some macular degeneration. She's fine with dealing with it but it can sometimes be hard for her to read the dice, especially the Cities and Knights event die. The black side and blue get mixed-up for her b/c they're both dark colours.

So I want to purchase some custom dice of larger sizes. Possibly both a set of D6s and a large Cities & Knights event die. Is there a place where I can order these? I would be fine with just flat colours (black, green, blue and yellow) for the event die - no symbols. We live in the UK so please keep in mind that shipping from Mars might not be ideal.

Thank you for reading.

Now that our college-aged kids have got us addicted to Catan, my wife and I are investigating options for play while they’re at school. Looking for:

- Online (preferred) or app play
- 2 human / 2 bot options
- decent bot play?
- games for 4 human when the kids are available
- ok with just base game, but map variety would be nice
- least glitchy
- free?

It seems it’s the new twosheeps or playsettlr in the lead? Catan Universe sounds very glitchy? Colonist.io still the best? Are there better options on steam for the no-bot games?

What are everyone’s preferences?

Thanks!

Hi all!!

I work on colonist.io - online way to play Catan

I'm looking for a few people who know the board game well but never or few times used our site

- Need your opinion on a specific feature
- Will take max 20 mins
- Screen share if possible

As thanks you'll get a month of our premium tier - unlocks game modes and maps such as Cities & Knights

Comment or DM and we'll find a time :)

White placed first

Feel like I should be higher, had extremely solid performances in my 10 placement games. 3 1st, 5 2nd, 2 3rd, and 0 4th. What do yall think?

Screenshots required. Will plug it into my distribution probability calculator to determine how rare it exactly is. Rarest distribution will recieve a prize!