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I’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.

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brookst 20 hours ago | parent [-]

Expand 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?

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asciimov 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	brookst 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		An sorry, I missed the deck part and thought we were talking about dice. Yes, a dice deck sampled without replacement allows card counting.

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toast0 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	frollogaston 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Why would anyone even use a dice deck then, to stop people from complaining about the law of small numbers?

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sdwr 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> dice decks