A naïvely constructed die - i.e. a perfect cube, but with pips dug out for each face - will already bias in favor of 6 rolls and away from 1 rolls simply because six pips require removing more material (and therefore mass) than one pip. Likewise with 5/2 and 4/3. The "precision" dice used in e.g. casinos address this by filling in the pips with material exactly as dense as the die's base material; the injection-molded dice in most board games (let alone wooden dice) obviously ain't constructed with that level of care.
This is also part of the reason why some dice games - particularly those typically played with cheap dice - deem 1 to be more valuable than 6 (example: Farkle) or require at least one 1 roll to win (example: 1-4-24). Or they'll require some number of high dice to make the game ever-so-slightly less brutal (example: Ship-Captain-Crew).
An interesting way to spice up any board game is to openly use loaded dice, but without any player knowing which numbers it favors. This adds a layer of strategy to whatever game you're playing, although it loses its appeal when people start taking out their calculators.
I think so much about how Catan showed up, got really popular, and then more or less right after that two of its huge characteristics (open trading + dice rolls as the primary decider of things) have almost completely disappeared from modern game design.
There's still dice rolls in some games of course, but open trading in particular feels like something that people really don't want in games anymore. And I totally get why
This might be a better cheat for… I dunno, maybe risk? Or monopoly?
In settlers, trade is always important… getting an early lead can get you ganged up on. At least in my experience, the best way to win is to look like you are in second place, line things up (get close to some crucial port for example) and then rocket past the Designated Villain only when doing so will get you a really solid lead.
FYI if you are suspicious that your opponent is cheating, it's easy to verify if dice are loaded or not: drop them in a glass of water a couple of times. If every time the same side ends upwards they are loaded.
Tangentially related but one of the reasons casinos use translucent dice is to make it easier to perform visual inspections to check for injected weights under the pips, etc.
I won a Settlers game against my boss who never invited me again. I don’t know what was wrong with his dice but we saw 6’s about three times as often as 8’s which makes me think one of the dice was borked and was rolling unevenly. I was in the picking rotation in a way where I ended up with several 6’s and I just steamrolled the entire game.
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.
> the standard scientific protocol tells us to conclude that we have no “significant” evidence that the dice are biased. (Notice that this is subtly different from having evidence that the dice are not biased! Confusing these two statements is a common mistake, even for trained phd scientists, and especially for medical doctors.)
but shouldn't it be "no significant evidence that the dice aren't unbiased"? that's different from either
It's kinda funny that the magnitude of the effect of this "cheating" is significantly less than the magnitude of the effect of who goes first or second.
Another way to look at board games and sports in general is as an alternative to war - settling disputes in a non-violent way and building social cohesion in the process. In board games there are no real losers and in war there are no real winners. So a win at all costs strategy may not be necessary.
This is neat, but I was expecting the soaking to affect the dice more. Is this enough to really affect how you play? The naughty and nice players had equal number of dots, but I feel like you usually have more uneven choices than that.
Seems like it'd be more advantageous to make people over/underestimate the chance of being robbed, but this didn't affect the chance of a 7. Is that the same no matter which side you soak?
I remember somewhere, might have been the Catan Android app, had an option to use cards instead of dice. The cards had all the combinations so no number could come up more often than it should. Never got to play it that way but it looks like an interesting solution to people complaining certain numbers come up too often.
Assuming this article is sort of tongue-in-cheek, I'll add something in the same spirit: The fact that the number of rolls required for the game is too low to be able to detect the unfairness does not imply that "it’s scientifically impossible for our opponents to know that we’re cheating." That's fallacious reasoning. In any situation where people actually cared about this and suspected a cheat, they could just say "Let's stop the game for a bit, roll the dice a bunch of times, and run some tests". There's no requirement that the dice only be rolled when required for the game. (If you refused to allow the test, that would obviously be even more suspicious.)
The "criticism" of a p-value was strange to me, because it's never taught to be an "end all" answer to a question, rather it's taught as a way of determining statistical significance. Every stats or economic analytics course I took in college explained that hypothesis rejection involved critical thinking in addition to p-value analysis.
Settlers brings out my angry side. I had a period of playing 1 on 1 with my wife, and she kept winning. That wasn't the frustrating part - what I didn't like was how early leads compound into larger leads as the game rolls on. So you know you are going to lose, and you just keep losing more. Much like Monopoly.
At least with games like chess, you might be down but you still have some hope of coming back with some maneuvering.
Maybe what I didn't like was the parallels with life. There's not usually a rabbit in the hat to come out on top, the rich just get richer.
How to cheat at settlers by loading the dice (2017)
(izbicki.me)140 points by jxmorris12 22 May 2025 | 110 comments
Comments
A naïvely constructed die - i.e. a perfect cube, but with pips dug out for each face - will already bias in favor of 6 rolls and away from 1 rolls simply because six pips require removing more material (and therefore mass) than one pip. Likewise with 5/2 and 4/3. The "precision" dice used in e.g. casinos address this by filling in the pips with material exactly as dense as the die's base material; the injection-molded dice in most board games (let alone wooden dice) obviously ain't constructed with that level of care.
This is also part of the reason why some dice games - particularly those typically played with cheap dice - deem 1 to be more valuable than 6 (example: Farkle) or require at least one 1 roll to win (example: 1-4-24). Or they'll require some number of high dice to make the game ever-so-slightly less brutal (example: Ship-Captain-Crew).
There's still dice rolls in some games of course, but open trading in particular feels like something that people really don't want in games anymore. And I totally get why
In settlers, trade is always important… getting an early lead can get you ganged up on. At least in my experience, the best way to win is to look like you are in second place, line things up (get close to some crucial port for example) and then rocket past the Designated Villain only when doing so will get you a really solid lead.
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.
This, or the process of loading the dice was simply not very effective.
but shouldn't it be "no significant evidence that the dice aren't unbiased"? that's different from either
Seems like it'd be more advantageous to make people over/underestimate the chance of being robbed, but this didn't affect the chance of a 7. Is that the same no matter which side you soak?
At least with games like chess, you might be down but you still have some hope of coming back with some maneuvering.
Maybe what I didn't like was the parallels with life. There's not usually a rabbit in the hat to come out on top, the rich just get richer.