Question about the Catan win stat I read on BGG last week (5 percent?)
I was scrolling the Catan forums on BoardGameGeek last Tuesday and found an old post from a tournament player who tracked 200 games. He said only about 5 percent of wins come from the longest road bonus alone. Everyone in my group swears the road is the whole game, and I told them this number and they just ignored me. Has anyone else seen stats like this, or is my group right to keep chasing brick and wood every single game?
Ran into the same thing with my group a couple years back. What finally shut them up was tracking our own games for a month, writing down how each winner actually got to 10 points. Turns out roads won maybe two games out of thirty, and most of those were small boards where nobody was fighting for them. The real killers were cities and dev cards, same as that tourney guy found. Longest road is a nice bonus when it falls in your lap, but building toward it every game is just handing your ore and wheat to whoever is spamming settlements. Show your group the actual paper trail from your own table and they will come around way faster than some stat from a stranger on BGG.