Comment by misuba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by misuba | Hacker News Reader

I agree with a lot of other commenters here that Catan is luck-driven and essentially over (except for a lot of tedious listening to people tell you _again_ that they don't have the resource cards you want) after you make your initial placements. What deserves more attention, though, are the ways in which "worse is better" applies here - the specific things about Catan that make hardcore gamers dislike it are, in many cases, the things that make it popular.

For instance, lots of people like to feel that when they win, it's because they were skillful, and when they lose, it's only because they were unlucky. On the other hand, if you really _are_ investing your skills in your decisions but still lose due to luck, you'll be really frustrated. Catan does an excellent job of keeping players busy, but essentially on an equal footing of powerlessness. On this basis it really appeals to people who get all kinds of nervous when asked to play any kind of game of skill with friends.

Randomness provides variance, which is essentially the range of opponent skill levels you can compete with. GoFish has high variance so anyone can play against anyone else (but is so random as to not be very fun) while chess has no variance so the better player almost always wins (also not fun, unless you match up well).

While unpopular with skill players, variance is handy in casual games like Catan because it broadens the range of people you can play with. Variance in the form of mana-screw in Magic does the same thing, with the bonus of allowing you to compete with a wider range of skill and money levels.

Variance is a great concept, thanks for bringing it to my attention!

I've played Catan with cards instead of dice- you have 36 cards, each with a number that can be attained by rolling two dice. How many times a number appears in the deck is its odds of being rolled. Statistically, you will roll 7 6/36 times, so there are 6 sevens in the deck. There is only one 2 and one 12 because their odds are 1/36. You shuffle the deck, and draw a card instead of rolling (once you go through the deck, you just reshuffle). This means that luck plays into when you will get a resource, but not if you will.

Flattening the bell curve can help a good deal, but the only way to guarantee that you get a resource each turn is to redraw until you hit a match with one of your settlements... unless I'm misunderstanding you.

edit: NM, I misread your last sentence. I've never seen a territory run dry for the whole game, but this would indeed prevent that.

A better game for that group would be Fluxx (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/258) -> lots of fun, interesting decisions, but a massive element of luck. In Fluxx, if you know what you're doing and get lucky, you can win extremely fast. If you don't get lucky, though, you're stuck. I've found that people interested in a light-weight game always end up liking it.

Ugg, seems like everyone has a copy of fluxx and while it might take no time to teach or setup it is really not that good of a game unless you are seriously drunk.

...except that many non-gamers are really flummoxed by the way Fluxx's changing goals keep putting different demands on them. They feel like the rug's been pulled out from under them, when really all that's happening is they're playing a game that's all tactics and no strategy.

"if you know what you're doing and get lucky, you can win extremely fast."

I would turn that around. The luck factor in Fluxx is staggeringly high. However, what makes Fluxx fun is that it does not make any attempt whatsoever to hide that fact.

My problem with SoC is that it has a very high luck factor, but that the game also tries very hard to hide that fact. The expansion Cities and Knights or using a deck of cards with the dicerolls make SoC bearable.

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