How much of Settlers of Catan is Luck?

I've played a lot of games of Catan against the computer on the Xbox 360, which gives stats, and I found that is almost all cases the player who had the most resources (produced - lost/stolen) won. To some extent this makes sense since a better economy will produce more resources, but it didn't seem to matter what the resources were or whether they were used directly or 4-crunched into something else.

What I took from that is if you're choosing settlement spots or robber targets you'll do pretty well just maximizing the number of resources you produce or block (which, for the robber, means multiplying the number of pips by the number of resource gained if the number rolls)

This isn't an answer to your question, but I think it would be pretty easy to come up with a few rule changes to make Catan deterministic.

You could get rid of the dice rolls by saying that a tile with a certain number on it will produce a resource every X turns.

The robber could either be completely eliminated, or you could just have players take turns moving it at some interval.

What bugs me about Settlers isn't that it's got too much luck, it's that I can pretty much tell who is going to win (or at least one of two) based on the initial settlement placement. Or at least who's going to lose. And it's pretty much completely no fun to play a game where the result is preordained that you'll lose.

Speaking of settlement placement: There aren't enough rolls in a game of Catan for the distribution of rolls to come out as you'd expect them. I've played a game where more 12s were rolled than 6s (though OMG were there a lot of 8s). It's not bad dice -- it's just the normal result of a "random" distribution when you're not generating that many results.

So a HUGE part of the strategy that the article misses is to maximize your DISTRIBUTION of numbers. I don't care if there's an 8/9/10 combo available for your second settlement; if you already have 8 & 9, you're much better off with a 3/4/5 combo (assuming you have none of those). Otherwise you're stuck with a feast or famine situation; sure you might be lucky, but you might instead be resource-starved for large parts of the game.

I actually picked up a "Deck of Dice" [1] to use with Catan, which is 36 cards that have a regular distribution of results of rolling two dice, but haven't given it a try yet to see if it makes Catan feel different. It seems like it might play a lot different; I really should give that a try... :)

[1] http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5460/the-deck-of-dice

You came to your conclusion based off a sample size of 1 from an anecdotal story...

It can be argued that making sure that you're not that losing player is a skill as well. There is a game called Family Business that is almost entirely based on this concept. Each player has a gang of mobsters, and on each turn you get action cards. The game revolves around the "hit list". You can put enemy mobsters on the hit list with action cards. When there are 6 or more mobsters on the hit list, a "mob war" starts, and on each turn the topmost mobster on the hit list is killed. The mob war continues until the hit list is empty. There are also action cards for removing a mobster from the hit list, instantly killing an enemy mobster, blocking a card that puts a mobster on the hit list, etc. The key to winning this game is convincing your friends to collectively screw over another friend, and to convince them that it is a bad idea to kill your mobsters by using the right tit-for-tat strategy and using intimidation and bluffing about which action cards you have to take revenge.

Similar strategies can work for Settlers of Catan as well. When a player does something bad like block you with a road and you're playing at a disadvantage, then you can sacrifice this game for scaremongering and do everything in your power to make the player that did it lose (block him with roads and always use the robber on him). Next game people will be more careful ;)