The Settlers of Catan (1995) is what I like to think of as a primordial eurogame. You can see some of the clean abstractions of eurogaming — like the resource-to-building engine — and Settlers pretty much invented modern ideas of clear iconography and rulebook-less play. However, Settlers has something that you wouldn’t expect to find a modern German-produced eurogame: a pretty big heaping dollop of randomness. I’m not talking about the development cards — which are more in line with the level of randomness you’d expect from a (somewhat random) eurogame. I’m talking about the production rolls at the heart of Settlers, where every turn players only earn the resources specified by an entirely random dice roll.

The dice rolling of Settlers reminds me more of the design of a French eurogame — which tend to have more theme and more luck. As a German game, it’s quite unusual … and some people hate that!

I should note that I’m not one of them. I’m perfectly happy to enjoy Settlers for what it is. However, I’m aware that not everyone agrees, so this week I wanted to spend some time on one of Germany’s top games, and investigate how its production could be made less random.

Consider this an intellectual exercise. Some of these ideas are drawn from the ‘net or from existing products. They’re arranged in approximate increasing order of wackiness. None of the new ideas have been tested out; some are just in outline form. However I hope you’ll enjoy some variations on a classic, and perhaps offer your own ideas for variations in the comments below.

Food Stamps. This is an old variation that has been floating around the ‘net for years — and the one that stays the closest Settlers‘ published production rules. In short: if you don’t get any production on a non-“7” roll, you get a food stamp; you can turn in a number of food stamps equal to your current VPs in order to receive a resource of your choice.

This mechanism is mainly an offset for bad luck. If you keep getting nothing, you at least get something. It  offers some psychological help too, as every player gets to grab something on almost every die roll. Of course, besides offsetting bad luck, it also offsets bad play — and even punishes the good play of spreading out your production numbers.

Some official Settlers variants have actually used food-stamp-like mechanics. For example in Merchants of Europe and Settlers of America: Trails to Rails you earn a gold if you didn’t get any production.

Event Cards. One of the problems with dice rolls is that they can theoretically allow for infinitely long runs of unlikely numbers. Worse, in Settlers there really aren’t enough production rolls over the course of a game for die-rolling luck to average out, so some production numbers will receive unlucky distributions every game.

The Catan Event Cards (more recently available in Catan: Traders & Barbarians) offset that by drawing cards from a deck. The deck approximately matches the distribution of a die roll, but the difference is that you’ll see most of the numbers come up each of the time through the deck. (I say most because the deck gets reshuffled shortly before you get to the end, so that the last few cards don’t produce known production results.)

On the upside, the event decks take most of the unequal luck out of Settlers. The “6” spaces and the “8” spaces will now come up approximately the same number of times — which never seems to happen in a dice-driven game of Settlers. On the downside, the event deck takes most of the unequal luck out of Settlers — and as I’ve written elsewhere accounting for luck can be a valuable (and interesting) skill in board games.

Flat Player Decks. Now we’re on to my own wacky (and unfinished and untested) ideas about changing up the randomness in Settlers. Imagine that each player had their own deck of cards: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. On their turn, they play one of their cards, and production occurs on that space. The card then goes out of play.

Each player plays through some percentage of his deck — maybe 6 cards (which is about half) or maybe 9 — then he gets all of his cards back. This means that a player will probably get to use most of his cards twice, but he can perhaps exclude some that don’t help him enough.

The advantage of this method is increased strategy — both in when you play your best cards and how you overlap your production with your opponents, to take advantage of their spaces. The disadvantage is that it flattens out the random distribution, so that no spaces are any longer better than others.

Curved Communal Deck. For a variation of the above, have a communal deck with a curved distribution that gets passed around the table. It’d run: 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 6, 7, 7, 7, 8, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10, 10, 11, 12. Players play cards out of the deck until 12 or 15 cards have been played, then all the cards are returned to the deck.

This unflattens the deck, but maintains the high level of choice from the previous variant. It also creates a new level of strategy, where you can play cards to purposefully spite your opponents (e.g., play a card while their hex is blocked by the robber or just before they build a settlement or city).

Curved Player Decks. As one more alternative to this base idea, each player could have their own curved deck, as above. However, you wouldn’t want to hand them the whole deck at once, as the deck would probably never get reshuffled, and they’d thus have too much choice over the course of the game.

Instead give each player a hand of three cards each turn. On their turn, they play one card, keep one card, and discard one card. This will more quickly move them through their deck, while still giving them choice. Make them reshuffle their hand when they’re down to 5 or so cards.

Worker Placement. My friend Mike A. suggested an idea that’s essentially worker placement: you place “workers” on a board that’s got spaces numbered 2-12, and then production occurs based on that number. Workers stay on the board, and block their spaces, which keeps the same numbers from coming up too often. I’d also say that you can’t place your worker back on the same space that you just removed him from.

As with my first player deck idea, this has the disadvantage of flattening the production numbers, but there are probably some more complex variations that could solve that problem. For example, you might have a board with my unflattened numbers: 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 6, 7, 7, 7, 8, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10, 10, 11, 12. Each player then could have three numbered meeples that they placed on the board (and replaced on the board) in order. Thus later in the game, 12 out of 21 spaces would be blocked at any time (for a 4-player game), forcing players to player on half the board total.

The Lonely Goatherd. Really far-fetched ideas could do away with the numbered production entirely — instead using other methods to choose which hexes produce.

Enter the Lonely Goatherd. The Goatherd starts at a random vertex on the board, perhaps one of the six corners of the desert. On his turn, a player then moves the Goatherd up to three vertices; afterward, the 1-3 production hexes connected to that vertex produce.

To keep the Goatherd’s movement from become too staid (and perhaps iterating back and forth between just a few locations), we give any player who doesn’t receive production on a turn a goat. Goats may be expended on a player’s turn to move the goatherd one extra vertex per goat.

This idea would probably need more tuning than any of the other ideas .. but it’s a fun way to look at just how different the production in Settlers could be.

And that’s the end of my first article-length delve into Settlers of Catan. It’s a sufficiently pivotal game in the field that at some time in the future I hope to dive more deeply into its mechanics and its many variants and expansions. For the moment, though, I’d love to hear your own ideas for changing up the way production works in this classic game.

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