Settlers of Catan Board Randomizer
The Settlers of Catan by Klaus Teuber is a fun board game with excellent replay value... if you can reliably generate a unique, fair experience. Enter the Settlers of Catan Board Randomizer—see the github repository and live website.
The GoalSome of my friends and family members will exploit any information they can in the pursuit of sweet board game victory. In Settlers of Catan, this takes the form of shaping the terrain map in ways that subtly bias the results. After several attempts at manual procedures for generating unique, fair maps were thwarted, I decided that an automated approach was in order.
The ProcessWhatever I created, I wanted it to be usable by my friends and family members, even when I wasn't around to complain about the "uniqueness" or "fairness" of the terrain map. I needed something with an intuitive interface that would be accessible to non-techies. I also wanted to learn something in the process.
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The SolutionI decided on a browser-based solution so that the interface would be familiar and accessible to my audience. I also wanted to learn how to use Javascript. All of the map generation logic is performed by client-side Javascript and then displayed using an HTML5 canvas. The board randomizer website is hosted freely by Github and is tied directly to the code repository, making maintenance easy for me and use easy for my audience.
My Responsibilities
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