The Settlers of Catan Xbox 360 and board games exhibit a common flaw among turn-based games: the first player has a huge advantage. We show how to adapt an economics theory for fair division called Last Diminisher into a practical mechanic that improves fairness by 3x, and thus gameplay balance, in Settlers and related games.

@misc{CarianMcGuire2008,
 author = {Sara Carian and Morgan McGuire},
 title = {Last Diminisher Improves Balance in {S}ettlers of {C}atan},
 note = {ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games Poster},
 year = {2008},
 url = {http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/papers/LastDiminisherI3D08/}
 location = {Redwood Shores, CA}
 }