I’ve been playing Catan on 360 again since I’ve hit a lull in games-to-play. After not having played it for a few months, it’s fresh and fun; although I’m nearing the phase where I’m bored with it again.

To me, Settlers is an old game. I heard about it when I was in high school, so it comes as a bit of a surprise to me that it is only now hitting mainstream and getting popular. So popular, that Wired has an article on it. Indeed, I even saw it in Barnes & Noble in NYC. There’s a mention of Catan in the article too:

In 2006, Brian Reynolds, a founder of Maryland software company Big Huge Games and the programmer who developed the AI behind the addictive computer classic Sid Meier’s Civilization II, set out to make an Xbox 360 version of Settlers. To help programmers develop the game’s AI, Teuber spent months exploring the mathematics of his most famous creation, charting the probability of every event in the game. The odds of a six or eight being rolled are almost 1 in 3 for example, while the chance of a four being rolled is 1 in 12. There is a 2-in-25 chance of drawing a Year of Plenty development card. Teuber created elaborate logic chains and probability matrices in a complex Excel spreadsheet so the videogame developers could see how every possible move and roll of the dice—from the impact of the Robber to the odds of getting wheat in a given scenario—compared. The end result was a sort of blueprint for the game that gave Big Huge Games a head start and showed just how complex the underlying math was. “It was the biggest, gnarliest spreadsheet I had ever seen,” Reynolds says.

And I found that there’s a version of Settlers coming out for DS!

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: nintendo, xbox