Colonist.io Reviews 31

If I could give this game minus stars I would. Worst game ever. You win 10 games in a row and then for some unexplainable reason you’ll lose the next 10+ games. Always the same story. What ever you do, don’t waste your money on paying for a subscription

Completely tilted games. If you are winning too many 1v1 games in a row you'll lose as many in a row as you just won no matter how good your placements are and the games won't even be close. Take away the favoring dice and it would be a great game.

Worst game I've ever played. Dice are completely rigged and absolute buns. This game is awful and needs new owners

Love the game. Just a shame that most games are ruined by the program manipulating the "dice". This is so rampant that they may as well have no dice at all and just calculate every roll as they do now. If you're about to buy a city there's a 90% chance you'll roll a seven on your next turn and have to give up half your resources. This is only one of the thirty odd cheats I have documented. They've ruined their own game. Their response to my critique? Banned. No ethics with the Colonist mob.

pure $ grab, the cost makes no sense
algorithmic dice will make you rage quit

Everything about it is terrible: the dice, the players, and it's a copyright lawyers wetdream - total ripoff of Catan, which is NOT public domain.

used to be fun, now they created an algorithm to control the rolls. same rolls after same moves

Just another business designed, not just for fun..algorythm setup specifically in favour of those who buy subscription, so dont talk about smart play or fairness at all..

This game is clearly rigged.

The pattern of 7 is clearly not random. It is rigged in specific way, that i can almost predict when 7 is about to fall. This is not only from me, but lot of people said this.

The dice is scrypted clearly no annoy you, because some sequences are 1:100000 but they happen almost each game. If the game decides that you loose, even if you have better tiles - you loose.

I give it one star because I can play it with friends and it's fun. However, if I tried to play online with other players or in a ranking, I would take that one star away. What the game sometimes shows with the dice is complete nonsense. The opponent rolls a 7, puts a robber on my 4, and then immediately rolls a 4 twice in a row. And I could find many more nonsensical examples in the game. Some players rolled 7 7 times in a game, and I only rolled a 7 once in that game. And as I read somewhere, the creators of this game absolutely do not tolerate criticism and opinions that criticize something about the game. I conclude that Colonist is far from an online replacement for Catan. It is just a poor imitation of Catan

2 star for allowing game play, especially with friends but making it obviously skewed and frustrating with the dice rolls in the online play with others
They explain their dice rolling algorithm in some blog post in hopes of sounding fair, but the charts and numbers are just nonsense and you can quite obviously understand after a while that the rolls favor or unfavor you depending on how much you have won or lost. I have had games where the person who has not a single settlement on an 8 or 6 has won in a 2 player game with a HEAVY margin. Even have screenshots for that. Just because I won a few games before and it was now this other player's turn to win.

No one is replying to questions... I have some bugs which make the game unplayeble.

Love the game, hate the dice. They came up with whole article about the dice randomness but didn't bother to come up with better algorithm for it. The amount of gray hair I started growing because of this is crazy. I can understand I won't win every game but losing 5 in a row because the dice favoured lowest numbers like 1,2,3 it's just pure evil. This game should be removed from existence for the sake of humanity. I'm sure one day there will be a real war caused because of this game unfair dice algorithm...

After 1083 games i must say that dices are scripted.

Colonist.io is an amazing website that allows you to play Catan for free on a browser or on your phone. I've played so many games in the last few months and I absolutely love it. Yes the dice can be frustrating sometimes, but anyone who actually played the board game or backgammon will know that it happens with real dice as well. It's just the nature of the dice that sometimes it rolls really in an unbalanced way. I play daily backgammon games with my family and I've seen that they roll 6 6 two sometimes three times in a row. Just yesterday, my mum rolled 5 doubles in a row. I was speechless, but it happens. The problem with Colonist is with the toxic community of players who don't know how to take a loss. Get better rather than whining everyone. Keep up the good work Colonist devs!

Apart from the user interface, there is nothing positive about this pathetic website. I cannot believe that their software engineers are so remarkably unskilled that they cannot even implement a random dice. The dice is manipulated for creating so called balanced dice. When you start rolling early 7s with a friendly robber, you know that the opponent will roll those 7s later to balance your number of 7s. How can an engineer be so stupid to come up with such an idea? It is really bad. The game Catan itself is such an enjoyable game and I am sorry that there is not any good website to play ever since playcatan website came to a halt. The software developers (apart from the GUI, front end developers) of this website should just quit for the sake of everyone. By the way, not to mention that the bot is more stupid than anything you can imagine. You can create a better implementation just by using ChatGPT.

0. The interface is good enough, but that's all positive(s).
1. The map making is totally unbalanced and rigged. The first and second players are always favored, the rest - good luck.
2. The dice are absolutely biased even if they claim that it has been proven to be fair. Place a robber on a tile, and the number is immediately rolled. Otherwise, never. The dice logic is open source, but not the rest of the implementation. Hence, you can't see the nice if-statemets they are packing around it.
3. Players very often bot out, and the bots are really stupid - they don't trade, they block a random person with the most points, etc.
4. Players are toxic. (Colonist by itself is so rigged that it is totally understandable why they have become so toxic.)
5. Players do not trade and do not aim to make the game fair for everyone. They take someone's spot to completely ruin their game, including when they are obviously the weakest player. Totally different from the real-life social game I have played.
6. Some players are unnecessarily slow and waste time.

To the Colonist.io team,

As a regular and passionate player of your platform, I am writing to express my serious concern—and now, my conviction—that your dice algorithm is not random and that it deliberately manipulates game outcomes to prevent certain players from winning, especially when they are nearing their personal best ranking.

________________________________________

⚠️ Evidence of rigged gameplay and artificial balancing

Manipulated dice outcomes:
The theoretical probabilities of 2D6 rolls are well established (binomial distribution). Yet after analyzing data from over 150 games, I have recorded significant and repeated deviations:
High-frequency tiles (like 6 and 8) go unrolled for 20+ turns,
The “7” appears far more often than the expected 16.67%, especially when a player nears 8–9 points,
Most tellingly: the leading player consistently gets denied key resources via unfavorable dice rolls, while opponents receive sudden windfalls.
Anti-win mechanics:
When a player nears their all-time high ranking, dice results become systematically unfavorable—even with strong placements. Meanwhile, opponents seem to be favored by a “catch-up” mechanic. This pattern strongly suggests a hidden balancing algorithm that hinders victory for the leading player.
Systematic, reproducible, statistically improbable:
These patterns are not anecdotal. They recur with enough consistency to rule out coincidence, suggesting an engineered outcome, not pure chance.

________________________________________

💥 Consequences of this practice

You turn a game of strategy and probability into a frustrating and unfair experience,
You compromise the credibility of your Elo ranking system,
You undermine user trust, which depends entirely on the assumption of algorithmic neutrality and statistical fairness.

________________________________________

❓Three questions for your team

Has your dice algorithm ever been publicly audited or peer-reviewed by an independent third party?
Are you using balancing logic or rubber-banding techniques (like in some competitive video games)?
Can you provide technical proof (source code, server logs, or large-scale statistics) that dice rolls are purely random?

________________________________________

🧨 Final warning

Unless you provide a clear and transparent answer, I reserve the right to:
Publicly publish my statistical analysis across gaming communities and review platforms,
Expose the pattern of manipulated dice rolls with supporting data,
Warn fellow players of what I believe is hidden cheating through a biased algorithm that ruins fair play and damages the game’s long-term reputation.

You will likely refer to the standard statistical defense: "variance is normal in small sample sizes." This would be a reasonable explanation if we were talking about isolated or random games. But here, we are observing contextual, targeted, and recurring patterns—always affecting the leading player or the one nearing a personal Elo record.
Specifically:

• These patterns are not random: they are systematic and contextual,
• They do not impact all players equally, but disproportionately punish the frontrunner,
• They occur at very specific moments (when the player reaches 8–10 points, or is about to break a record), which is statistically improbable without some form of programmed bias,
• If you have nothing to hide, publish your dice roll logs or codebase (even anonymized). Transparency is the only way to dismiss this concern.
•
Without that transparency, invoking statistical randomness is no longer valid. It becomes a smokescreen to deflect from the presence of algorithmic rubber-banding.

________________________________________

This issue must be taken seriously. A competitive game platform cannot survive without full player trust in the neutrality and randomness of its mechanics.
I expect a transparent and documented response.

Sincerely,

Williams Davis Roulance