For a while they sold a pack of 36 cards as a Catan accessory, labeled with 2 through 12 in the same frequencies as two six sided dice, and instead of rolling the dice you flip over the top card and then you shuffle them and start over when you reach the bottom.

It's an interesting change to gameplay, since the numbers are no longer independent and the gambler's fallacy ("I haven't had a 12 for a while, so it's more likely to come soon") actually makes sense here. You could restore independent numbers by reshuffling the entire deck after each turn.

That seems like an easy way to get the results from the article, without worrying about biased dice or repainting. If you want to alter the deck's probability you can just add or remove cards.