Psychology lessons from board games: What Settlers of Catan can teach us about non-linearity
What can Settlers of Catan teach us about our difficulty in spotting non-linear patterns?
This post is inspired by a piece written a while back by David Knott on what Technologists can learn from Board games.
I’ve wanted to write something like this for a while, but I also wanted to do justice to the post. As a result it has taken me more time to put together than anticipated and ended up being substantially longer than planned.
So to help break it up I’ve split the content up over several posts which I’ll publish through the course of February.
Many of my posts centre on research areas that interest me or on topics that come up in the course of my work with tech clients. However, occasionally I write about themes from my personal life and on topics that I deeply care about outside of work. The aim of this series of posts is to try to do a mix of both of those things!
During the traditional January period of reflection and resolutions, I was thinking about how I spend my time (in particular, time not spent at work or on a screen) and I found there were four main activities that were crucial to helping me re-charge:
Spending time with my partner (she’d hate for me to write about this)
Climbing (I might write about this at some point)
Cooking (I will definitely write about this in the future)
Playing board games (I’m writing about this today)
Of these habits, the fourth one, playing boarding games, has been the most recent addition to my life. Despite enjoying classic board games as a kid - chess, cluedo, monopoly, scrabble, articulate - I only rediscovered the hobby as an adult in the last few years. However, as I learnt more about it I’ve become somewhat obsessed with a whole bunch of modern board games and the board game industry more generally.
In case you are not a board game aficionado, many consider the period we are living in to be the “golden age of board games”. The number of published board games has exploded since the early 2000s and has only recently started to level off:
Beyond just numbers, the variety of types of games and mechanics (subsets of rules around specific elements of each game) have also massively expanded. Early modern games like the ones I’ve highlighted above typically introduced these new mechanics and more recent designers have run with them in new contexts and combinations.
While almost all of these games are created by thoughtful and caring game designers, it can be hard to keep up with the volume. This massive number of games has led to a bit of a paradox of choice where consumers don’t know which games they should invest their money or time in.
As a result of the paradox of choice, there is increasing value in providing “curation”.
Cutting through the volume to offer people a smaller number of high quality names, vetted by a source that the reader trusts. Curation is a wider trend in our modern attention economy. You can find curated restaurant lists, clothes selections, holiday destinations, meditation techniques and even curated lists of unique baby names. In too many areas of modern life, we’re faced by overwhelming choices. So it’s not surprising that the most ascendant social media company, Tik Tok, is one that learns what we like and feeds us an endless stream of curated video content.
However, one challenge with curation is understanding if your tastes are aligned with the person curating the list. This post has a curated list of 5 of the games that give me most joy on a regular basis. I’m not going to try to convince you that they are fun to play, but instead I’m going to try to make this curated list a bit different. On top of being fun to play, each of the games I’ve chosen contains some lessons about how the human brain works (or in many cases doesn’t). I’ll point out the key game mechanics or aspects that reinforce biases or cognitive challenges, and hopefully it will be plain to see some parallels between these games and situations we face in everyday life.
So, over the course of February I’m going to share 4 posts each covering a board game I love and what it can teach us about psychology. It’s all a bit of fun, but at the same time hopefully we’ll all learn some helpful things.
Game 1: Learning non-linearity from Settlers of Catan (1995) by Klaus Teuber
I had to start with the game that reignited my later-in-life love of games - which is Settlers of Catan.
How does the game work: You and the other players are building roads, settlements and cities on an island in a race to build the best civilisation (as measured by victory points). You can do this by building more settlements or cities, more roads, a larger army, or by investing in your civilisation's development. The way you make progress is by getting resources produced by the island (determined by rolling 2 dice) and trading those resources with other players.
What mechanics are we particularly interested in: At the start of a game of Catan, players place their initial two settlements. These settlements determine what resource you collect from the Island - if each settlement is adjacent to 3 hexes which have frequent dice rolls you will get significantly more resources. I’ve illustrated what this placement can look like below. In this case Red has a pretty good (arguably the best) starting position because they are adjacent to three separate resources which all have fairly likely numbers - highlighted by the dots on the hex tiles. Blue has a comically bad position, they have access to only 2 resources and the dice rolls they need to get these resources (3, 4 or 11) are unlikely.
What psychology lesson can we learn from it: One challenge with Catan is that placing settlements in bad locations can destroy your game. Small mistakes in this first phase of the game massively magnify as the game goes on. This nonlinearity is for a two reasons:
First, it’s hard to build settlements at the start of the game because you don’t have many resources, having bad starting settlements is much worse than having bad settlements later in the game because for a long while they are your only way of getting more resources.
Second, if you are adjacent to hexes which need unlikely dice rolls you won’t get the resources you need to build more settlements (which in turn get you more resources) so that initial “slow period” lasts even longer.
So you would guess that all players who have played more than a couple of games of Catan know this well and don’t make the mistake of choosing low production settlements in the initial placement phase. Well, it’s not that simple. Other players are competing for good spaces and it’s often not obvious which spaces are going to be available for you. Also you want to have access to as many resources as possible, so you may end up choosing a bad space because it gives you access to one of the resources you need. As a result, it’s a pretty frequent occurrence that players choose spots that have lower production.
However, psychology research suggests they might be doing this too often.
Part of the challenge is that we really struggle to accurately predict non-linear relationships. This is made worse in Catan because differences in initial placements continue to compound throughout the entire game, so small errors can be massively magnified.
Take the difference between a placement next to a 5 hex and a placement next to a 4 hex. The number only differs by 1, how much worse could the 4 hex really be?
Well over 8 turns, two full rounds of Catan, the difference starts to add up:
This difference is massive! If you were placed near a 4 hex there’s a 1 in 4 chance it won’t produce anything in the next 8 turns, which is the same probability the 5 hex will produce 3 resources.
The reality is we are just really bad at making these calculations intuitively, and only through painful trial and error can we start to adjust what we consider to be a good initial placement.
This difficulty to understand non-linearity has a huge impact because non-linear relationships are everywhere. We fall prey to marketing tricks because we struggle to understand whether non-linear offers are a good deal or not, we underinvest because we don’t find compound interest intuitive and we underestimate the impact of climate change because we don’t think about tipping points. Being aware of our bias against non-linearity is important and if you can get good at spotting non-linear relationships in the wild you can change your behaviour for the better.
Subscribe for next week’s post about a game of lies and deception.
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