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You've heard of Pokémon Speed runs.
You've heard of Zelda's speed runs, but have you ever heard of Catan speed runs?
Probably not, because why would anyone do that?
But ever since the thought crossed my mind, I couldn't ignore it.
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I needed to know if it could be done.
It needs to be done.
I'm ready to do battle and I won't rest until it's settled.
Here's the challenge hypothetically, how quickly can someone win a game of Catan if played
perfectly and everything went their way?
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And I mean everything.
Perfect dice rolls.
Perfect placements.
Perfect development cards and perfectly dumb opponents.
This should be interesting.
But in my excitement, I got ahead of myself and did something stupid.
I place an insane bet with my wife that I could design a perfect run in Catan where
a player could win the game on their first turn
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, first turn.
My wife laughed at me and said, Do you want to bet on it?
And in my pride as a gamer, I agreed without checking the fine print, to which she then
added, If you fail whenever we play Catan you have to give me all the cards you start
with forever.
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Well, sheep.
The pressure is on.
I've made my bed and I have to lay in it.
Now I just need to think of an idea of how to do this thinking, thinking, man, this bit
is uncomfortable.
As a first attempt, I needed to just get a feel of how plausible this was.
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I set up a game board and played it out after one round, I barely had a road placed and
some leftover cards that I couldn't buy anything with a complete failure.
I was about to throw in the towel after a five minute attempt, but then I remembered,
I need to finish this video.
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So I took some notes from my failure.
I learned very quickly that even with good placements and perfect roles, I still will
not have enough resources to get ten victory points within one round.
In my desperation, I thought back to the challenge at hand, hoping to find some loophole I could
abuse.
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Hypothetically, how quickly can someone win a game in Catan if played perfectly and everything
went their way?
Everything went their way.
And then it hit me like a ton of bricks.
Hailey's bet gave me an idea.
The first thing I changed was allowing myself to pick and choose where everyone placed their
initial settlements, not just me, but
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the opponents to and to justify this level of control.
I thought if I kidnaped my opponent's families and then told them they had to follow my orders
or else, then under these conditions they would basically assist me in my game while
still following the rules at the time.
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And by that, I mean, they can't just give me cards.
They would still need to train me, but they would trade me exactly what I wanted.
Secondly, I played on the assumption that the dice would roll exactly the numbers I
needed because in the real game, in infinite universes, that could happen.
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Now with this new plan in place, I set up another game this one went way better right
at the start.
My hostages, I mean, the other players traded me their starting cards with two to one deals,
landing me at least twelve cards on turn one.
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I was in a much better position than my last attempt, but still way short of my goal.
This wasn't possible.
I'm going to lose that bet with my wife and be screwed in all our future games of Catan.
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But there was still one idea that seemed plausible.
I went back to Hailey and explained that this was a silly bet and a one turn win was impossible.
I asked her to take it back, but then she did something I didn't expect.
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She said, can trust your instincts when you have the idea.
Some part of you truly believed that was possible.
Step back, breathe and think back to that moment.
I was inspired by her words, but I still needed a good idea.
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Then it hit me like a ton of bricks.
Oh, I got to stop saying that.
OK.
This is it.
This is the game plan.
I just need to lay it out all in front of me and connect the dots.
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What is the least amount of resources that I need to get ten victory points?
I started going through the options.
The most obvious one was development cards.
I could spend three resources to get a dev card and buy a point.
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And there are five victory points in that deck, meaning I need 15 resources just to
get those five points.
And since I'm playing on God mode, I would assume that the top five cards I draw are
victory at points.
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Good start, so with my first two starting settlements and five victory points, that
puts me at seven points total, how would I get another three points?
15 resources is already a lot to hope for and one round if I tried to buy three more
settlements, at the least it would cost me 20 resources.
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20.
OK, what else if I try to make cities, I could build one more settlement and upgrade my three
settlements to cities.
But that's 21 resources.
That's even worse.
What about largest army?
I would need to buy three more victory cards, which is pretty cheap, but then I would have
to wait for tenants to play them all
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. That's a way beyond my first turn.
OK, what about longest road?
I could do that with ten resources?
OK, not bad.
Big difference from the other options.
So in total, I would need 25 resources in one round.
That's the game plan.
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Find a way to generate 25 resources on my first turn.
But then I realized what the real challenge was.
I needed to have the perfect hack set up with the perfect placements and the exact dice
rolls to get those resources.
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Which, if I counted right, is six ores, seven sheep.
seven wheat two wood and two brick in one round.
It's time for diagrams and spreadsheets.
I set up a basic Catan board in Illustrator and started moving around hexes and coloring
and tiles, although I could place the hexes where I wanted since those are essentially
random.
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I had to abide by the order of the numbered tokens following their A-Z placement rules
and the number of Hex resources allowed.
I could not think of a systematic way to do this, nor do I have any programing skills
to automate it somehow.
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So it was a lots of trial and error.
I also had a spreadsheet going to track what the dice results should be for each turn,
who got what resources from their settlements, how those resources were traded and what the
current victory point situation was.
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As you can imagine, this took a lot of time after who knows how many attempts of shuffling
numbers around.
I felt that I landed on a real possibility to make this happen.
All that's left is to play it out.
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I started by doubling down on the resource rules so that if I needed a lot of wheat,
I put wheat on the same number, then I placed settlements so that each dice roll straw gave
me the maximum number of resources I could get.
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Then I placed everyone's second settlements to get any resources that I didn't have room
to roll for.
OK, we're set.
Let's roll dice.
I chose to start with a ten rule to fulfill my wheat requirement quickly, as that was
among the highest priority resources, followed by an 84 sheep for the same reasons.
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Then I did a four for some orange sheep that I needed for some deep digging of dev cards.
three turns up finished.
It is now my turn.
This is my first turn of the game and in this turn, I need to get all 25 resources needed
to execute the plan for ten victory points.
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I chose four as my best, but after distributing the last of the resources, the trading began,
I trade blue in or in exchange for three or one sheep, one wooden, one brick.
The net trade green and or four for wheat in one brick.
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And finally, I traded yellow sheep for six sheep, one wheat and one wood.
I am now holding 25 resources in my hand.
On turn one, I start by buying a road and a development cart to get road building, securing
me the five road minimum I needed to acquire longest road.
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At the end of the road, I dropped a settlement for an extra points.
Then, with my remaining resources, I dug into the development card deck, drawing victory
point up to victory point and still had five victory points, which got me to the goal line.
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Ten victory points on turn one.
And an extra sheep for style points.
I now hold the world record for fastest possible win in Catan.
Come at me, bro.
Now that you're all warmed up and gotten time to get serious or silly with more kitten videos.
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