The author's wife could only tolerate so much.

I like to believe that Klaus Teuber secretly specified dice biased towards 1-2-3, strictly for personal benefit in games, and the author’s approach has obscured a much greater effect in that direction.

About the last point- I remember hearing somewhere, though it could be an urban legend, that that's precisely the reason early Dungeons & Dragons (OD&D/AD&D era) had so many variations within different dice roll mechanics for whether or not a high (or low) roll was good or bad (ie high rolls for your attack was good, high rolls for initiative were bad).

If the player used the same dice for all rolls, a balance check against biased or loaded die was therefore built directly into the game, with the perk of making it very obvious if a player was using specific dice for specific rolls

"20? Your axe cleaves straight through through the orc, decapitating him, and reducing the pillar behind him to rubble!"

"You should probably know that this was a load-bearing pillar."

You reminded me, and I think I have some, or at least some variety of these as a set of 10d6. Metal, and the pips are precisely machined to such depths where they're perfectly balanced. Nice bronzed finish, with black pips.

Also, if someone is obviously cheating with a loaded die at an RPG game, they're not the kind of player that should be invited back. Most characters have ways of increasing their modifiers to rolls that matter most to them (My current ranger is 1d20 +16 for Perception), and having high-enough base numbers can mean that anything other than a natural 1 is usually some kind of success.

Seems like the solution to that (from a cheater's perspective) would be to bias the dice toward the mid-range numbers, but I don't know enough about D20 layouts to know if that's feasible.

Most commonly, the pips are slightly dug out, then paint is put into the holes.

Good point.

That's indeed a possibility, especially with modern manufacturing techniques allowing sufficiently-precise molds.

Depends 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?

Catan, 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.

For 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.

A 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.

Cheaters might be able to sneak in some loaded dice, so the dice being easy to inspect is good for the house.

It 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.

It is in their best interest to have a fair game. The transparent dice are to prevent the players from cheating the casino, not prove it's fair to the players.

Nothing to do with scruples, but I don't think casinos need to load dice too. They already have 'loaded the maths' and this is in the open - over time they win. Why act covertly in an underhand way, whilst also providing the opportunity for gamblers to test themselves against probability? You'd think they wouldn't want to jeopardise their market provision and need the belief of their consumers to maintain this.

The 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.

With 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.

> dice decks

That 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.

Well, get creative and find some middle ground. Maybe add a rule that player that has no cards on hand and gets no resources in this turn can reshuffle.

They bundled it into the Traders & Barbarians expansion.

With 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.

Settlers of Catan explicitly requires 3 players, in fact. I'm not terribly surprised it doesn't work great with 2.

Yeah I’m so sick of getting bashed haha

In 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)

> 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.

> Monopoly feels like the game might take 4 hours

For what it's worth, if you play Monopoly by the actual rules, and you don't act stupidly stingy on your trade offers, a 4-player game of Monopoly shouldn't take more than 30-45 minutes.

The problem is, people of course don't like losing, and everybody loves a comeback story. So people play with house rules that constantly inject extra money into the game, which prolongs the game's purpose: For all the wealth to consolidate to a single player.

House rules in Monopoly are so common that a lot of people don't even realize they're playing house rules!

Do you give money for landing on Free Parking? You're playing a house rule.

Do you give $400 instead of $200 for LANDING on Go? You're playing a house rule.

Do you allow purchasing Hotels when there aren't enough houses? Do you allow building to not be even? Do you use some sort of object to act like a hotel because the game only comes with 12 hotels in the box? You're playing house rules. The fact there are only 12 hotels and 32 houses was a deliberate design choice to force players to trade and allow one player to horde all the houses and hotels.

You can't mortgage properties that have buildings on them. You must sell the buildings first, and you only get half of what you paid for them from the bank. When you unmortage, you have to pay an extra 10% fee. You don't collect rent on mortgaged properties. If you play any differently, you're playing a house rule.

Rolling doubles 3 times sends you to jail. That's actually NOT a house rule!

Speaking of jail, you DO still collect rent while in it! This means that deliberately staying in jail can actually be a strategic move if another player is possibly about to land on your dark Green properties (Baltic, North Carolina, Pennsylvania) while your opponent owns the Oranges, which you're likely to land on immediately after leaving jail.

Don't get me wrong, Monopoly is a shitty game for many reasons, but "Games take 2+ hours" is not one of them unless you're playing it wrong.

Settlers might have less of a snowball effect than Monopoly, but it's definitely there. Pretty much any resource-gathering game is going to have it. If your resource numbers get rolled early on, you get to be the first one to build a city or a third settlement. Then your income is higher, so you'll get to the 4th point faster. And so on.

Like another commentor said, the intended fix for this in Settlers is social dynamics: the leader is going to be blocked from the best settling spots, isn't going to get favorable trade deals, and is going to get hammered by the robber. The key strategic gameplay in Settlers is not about profit maximization (that's pretty easy to do), it's about minimizing any appearance that you're a threat until it's too late to do anything about it. If players never collaborate to take down the leader, then early gains can definitely beget later gains.

I think we gotta explore the card game space more. There are a lot of simple and addictive card games where you can get in the zone playing 4 hours straight.

Would you recommend a few that are beginner friendly and available at my local board game shop?