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Comment by nicoco | Hacker News Reader

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nicoco·

30/60 maybe?

EDIT: probably not after reading the comments. I thought I was smart ;)

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40/50 probably. One of the 10 numbers never showed up. 1-5 tails, 6-9 (should be 10) heads.

I ran into the same thing when I made a custom dice roller for Settlers of Catan. Rand(1, 6) never produced a 6, which you could tell if you inspected the comments closely, but still feels counter-intuitive to me.

Our Catan set has noticeably nonuniform dice. They roll high numbers much more frequently than low numbers; presumably bc the high-numbered sides weigh less (?). We haven't buckled down and done the science but it definitely tilts the game play, to the extent that we're considering swapping them out for new dice.

(or this could just be Catan Crankiness (TM), but we've all noticed it quite a bit...)

On the subject of Catan and dice:

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/dice/

That is a good example of an over engineered solution. The game already has a far simpler way to make it easier for all players to get started, regardless of how many turns you play. It might be from one of the expansions, but we use it in the normal game as well.

The "friendly robber" rule states that you are not allowed to place the robber on any tile that has a village of a player that does not have any points yet.

Either could be the case - if it was generating numbers from 1-9 instead of 1-10 30/60, if it was comparing <= 5 vs <5 it could be 40/60

Yeah, I'm almost certain it was the latter. I remember they shared the code snippet, but that was in 2007 and the game's forums have been replaced since then. I did find a recounting of it:

https://forums.achaea.com/discussion/comment/249213/#Comment...

(and the associated quest to discover the easter egg of a coin landing on its edge with 1 in a million odds that was added when the bug was fixed)

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