After over 400 ranked games on the Xbox 360 version of Settlers of Catan and however many years, I had a game where I ended up with settlements on EVERY number. So whatever the dice rolled (apart from 7, which didn't come up much at all in this game) I got cards every time.
It's not unusual to gather 7 or 8 of the 10 available numbers (two dice so 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11 or 12 with 7 being a soldier move) by the end of a game but usually the 2 and the 12 are too far away and, by their nature of being least likely to come up in a dice roll, not worth getting.
I was the Blue player this game, placing 4th/5th at the start. I had my opening settlement in the middle of 5/10/9 (Sheep/Sheep/Wood) and the 8/4 (Grain/Brick) port. The red guy cut off my route to the 3/6 (Ore/Ore) by building a road to it in the first couple of turns but I kept getting sheep I could port trade and the 4 gave me plenty of brick, so I managed to build a road all the way around the 4 and still take that settlement position.
I realised once I'd done that that I had the potential to get them all, so I built up the 12/6/11 (Grain/Ore/Sheep) then down to the 2/5 (Brick/Sheep) and enjoyed my uninterrupted stream of cards, which I used to put the winning settlement on the 4/11 (Brick/Sheep) edge position.
I sometimes stream the games to record them on http://www.justin.tv/umopapisdnpuaq (now http://www.twitch.tv/umopapisdnpuaq for gamers). Here's a video of a different game, I think the fastest one I've had. I've won in fewer dice rolls before but this whole game flew by.
Watch live video from umopapisdnpuaq on Justin.tv
A list of my Catan games on justin.tv
My 'Grandmaster of Catan' status comes from the achievements on the 360 for the game that are all Settler, Builder, Soldier, Statesman, Villager etc.. "of Catan". As I kept playing beyond getting all these my buddy Chronic kept making up new ones. One day after several more ranked match wins in a row I declared to him that I had become a Grandmaster of Catan, based on my win ratio. So it's just a jokey title :)
Catan is a 4 player game, so the average player long term will win 1 and lose 3 of every 4 games, giving them a 25% win rate. Some people (on Xbox Live especially) find it quite hard to deal with the fact they will lose most of the time, even if they do nothing wrong, in a game that takes over half an hour to play.
My current ranked match (where you get matched with 3 other random people) stats are
Played 409. Won 181. Lost 228. This puts my win rate at 44.25% so I've won nearly half my games. If you factor in all the games where people have quit out so the win didn't register I'd still be up at or around 50% which is where I was when I said I became a Grandmaster.
I don't ruthlessly play to win, I play because it's fun. I just somehow have a knack for winning Catan games.
