How I Built the Best Catan Board
If you’ve ever played Catan, you know just how important the first settlement selection is. Picking first can give you a huge advantage, while picking last can put you way behind before the game even starts. What if there was a way to find the most fair Catan board setup? Through multiple rounds of MATLAB simulations, I found some of the best (and worst) board arrangements to make your Catan games more fair (or not).
To simulate random Catan board arrangements, I started out with two arrays. The first one shown below is for resource types, while the other is the number tile values.
lands = [1 1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 5 5 5 5 6]; % Initializing resource typesnums = [2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6 6 8 8 9 9 10 10 11 11 12 0]; % Initializing number tiles
1 = Wood, 2 = Ore, 3 = Brick, 4 = Wheat, 5 = Sheep, and 6 = Desert
Both arrays are randomized, and we get a unique combination of resources and number tiles. The 6 and the 0 will always stay together, to show that the desert does not have a number tile. Each of the resource types was also assigned a weight, just due to some being more valuable to winning than others.
for l = 1:19 % Assigns weights to each resource type (some are higher than others due to more being needed to win on average)
