A guy at my Tuesday game night tried to tell me Catan is 'solved' and pulled out a binder to prove it

Brooke Reed · 2026-10-04T21:40:04.328247+00:00

So I go to this board game meetup every Tuesday at a coffee shop in Sacramento and there's this one dude, Dave, who always brings a giant binder. Two weeks ago I sit down for a 4 player game of Catan and Dave slides this binder across the table before we even roll. It had 40 pages of printed spreadsheets, dice odds by turn number, the best opening spots for every board layout, all of it. I asked him point blank if he was joking and he said, and I swear this is a direct quote, 'the game is basically solved if everyone plays right.' The funny part is he finished dead last because the rest of us kept trading with each other and freezing him out. He packed up his binder at like 9pm and said we were 'playing it wrong on purpose,' which honestly, yeah, we were. Now every Tuesday someone yells 'check the binder' when a dice roll goes bad. How do you all handle the spreadsheet guy at your table, do you just roll with it or do you ban the binder?

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A guy at my Tuesday game night tried to tell me Catan is 'solved' and pulled out a binder to prove it | Board Game Geeks - Thought Shares