Find a flaw

find a flaw

desert goes in the middle?

Dice.
/thread

Sheep are underpowered.

Never played it, but a friend claims a good player can do everything right and still lose to a shit player who did everything wrong.

Pretty much. It's a good beer and beers game with a full map. The most important game aspects I experienced are trading and 'king making' (I mean that some players ally with another player and let him win even though it's bad for them). It's good fun though, especially because it feels pretty realistic in terms of the behavior of jealous settlers/traders. AND the rules are really fucking simple.

Random dice rolls decide whether you get to participate in the game or not. Getting screwed over resources leave you with little possibility to trade for what you need and puts you behind in building and victory points, and there is no other comeback mechanism than hoping for rolls favoring you in the future.

I find the concept boring.

Fun as fuck though

Probability dictates that a whole game of shit will be a highly comedic rarity.

Rolling dice in boardgames is just a bad mechanic in general.

are you baiting

It's far too luck based. While luck can be an interesting mechanic, luck should never determine whether or not you can even participate in the game, and early on, each turn is effectively a coinflip to see just that. Worse yet, there's no catch-up mechanics; the better off you are, the better off you'll continue to get, while the worse off you are, the less you can do to counteract that. For that reason, the game will generally come down to two people who have a chance to win and the other player or players being held captive by them. Not to mention that since it's pretty easy to totally block someone off, you can easily get pushed to that point where you basically can't win the game by a few unlucky turns. Oh, and it can easily be turned into an interminable slog if resources only end up on rare spots.

I don't think I've ever played a game of this where the person who played the Monopoly card lost the game, unless somebody else played Monopoly after them... and won.

If Catan had no dice rolls the games winner would be decided on turn 1 and the rest of the game would be just a slow linear progress to victory, soon enough people would find one strategy that would always win the game and only that strategy would be used. Every board game requires some "destabilisation" factor that makes the games progression less linear.

If you pick your starting position correctly, you will not be in a situation where you have no resources. You're acting as if there is no way to make your outcome better, when the game fucking tells you which tiles are the best.

>there's no catch-up mechanics
Flat out lie. There's really op catch up mechanics in the dev. cards, such as monopoly.

Starting positions are really important; if you choose poorly, you're fucked.

Sorry, forgot to answer to OP. The games are always way too close calls. I've had people beat me just because they came before me in the turn order. This easily house ruled though.

I don't think that is a flaw, especially when the game gives everyone a fair chance to grab a good spot. It's strategy

>Every board game requires some "destabilisation" factor that makes the games progression less linear.

That factor is the players.

>If Catan had no dice rolls the games winner would be decided on turn 1

Try this as a project - play a game of Catan with friends, but instead of rolling the dice tell the players they get to choose which number gets rolled every turn.

See what happens.

I suggest this from experience. It turns the game from light hearted beer and pretzels into something as bloodthirsty as Diplomacy.

The catch-up mechanic is trading. No one wants to trade with the guy who has a huge advantage, meaning they'll fall behind eventually, especially if they get focused by the other player's robbers/knights.

An interesting home-rule I've seen used is a Robin Hood Law for the thief. When players have to discard cards for having over 7, those cards go to the player with the least points.

>That factor is the players.
Not if you restrict the players via rules. Which Catan does. Without dice rolling in catan, the game would be 100% linear.

As for the rest of your post, it makes positioning less strategical and makes trade less valuable. It might add something, but takes away also.

You're acting as if you can always pick the optimal start positions, and as if the dice won't fuck you up. Everyone is jockeying for the best starting positions, and it's pretty much guaranteed you're going to have to pick at least one that isn't so great. Plus it's not impossible, or even implausible, for a 6 or 8 to get rolled just a couple times per game. The lower a die's odds are, the more likely that you'll never see resources from a given tile. Plus, since all those spaces are in contention, a few bad turns can mean one is now a dead space for you, since you got blocked off.

As for cards as a catch-up mechanic... You understand that the people who are already winning get a lot better access to cards than those who don't, right? And that, again, getting access to a good card as opposed to yet another soldier?

not enough dragons and/or cyberpunk cuties

its not fun

Boo hoo, it's not chess. Winding up with a 6 or 8 not getting rolled all game is something that can and does happen, I've certainly suffered from it, but then one of the ways you can mitigate against it is by ensuring that you have settlements on a range of numbers, rather than just a couple. It might mean that you get fewer resources, but then it might also save you from a run of bad luck.

H E X A G O N A L

It's also not Carcassone, Roll for the Galaxy, Dominion, or almost any other game where luck features prominently and yet doesn't make it determine the entire game's outcome.

Roads are bullshit and 90% of the games are decided by someone stealing longest road out of nowhere.