A fan has simulated an enormous number of games of the board game Catan, running 36,000 matches through a programme and then sifting through the results to try and work out which strategies are most effective.
One of the things they noticed is that the longest road victory points are often a deciding factor, with 56 - 61% of all victories going to those with the most prolonged pathways. Games involving the longest road were also significantly shorter than those without.
Posting to the r/boardgames subreddit last week, user Hot-Rooster1675 explained that they had used Claude to help them build a Catan simulation, where four different strategies would be tested against one another in an enormous number of games, involving a variety of board states and player counts.
Those strategies are:
BalancedBuilder - maximises 'pip' count, effectively seeking the best access to a wide range of resources
OreWheatSheep - prioritizes these three resources, focusing on city development and development cards
RoadBuilder - does what it says on the tin, prioritizes longest road
PortRusher - builds near ports and prioritizes the resources it can trade at those ports
After running the simulations, no single strategy was crowned the ultimate winner. Each one had the advantage in a different starting situation.
There were some other interesting observations, as well. For instance, wheat was found to be the best resource, with the biggest difference between game-winners and game-losers being a massive gap in wheat production.
And interestingly, the starting position (assuming you're not doing something ridiculous) seemed relatively unimportant, with no advantage gained by starting with more pips.
Hot-Rooster noted that there were a number of problems with the simulation, which limit its effectiveness for drawing conclusions about real games of Catan. For instance, player trades follow quite simple logic in the simulation, not capturing the deal-making, politicking nature of real Catan.
An in-depth and soundly reasoned comment by user chalks777 also pointed out some other flaws. The big one is that these computer-controlled players had a preselected strategy going into the game, which they would not break from. This doesn't map onto how real humans play the game, adapting to their situation and what other players are doing.
However, the creator has responded, saying they're taking the feedback on board and will attempt to tighten up these issues in future tests. For science!
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