YOUR ISLAND AWAITS
THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE ISLAND
Each pip represents one of the 36 equally likely dice outcomes.
WHY FAIR SHORES?
Dice are unpredictable. Your island’s production doesn’t have to be. Fair Shores rearranges the real number tokens to bring resource production closer together, while preserving the tiles, tokens, and regions needed by your scenario.
Even total pips gives each resource a similar production budget. Even pips per tile keeps tile strength similar, so resources with more tiles retain more total production. Gold is reported separately because it can produce any resource.
Balance is a best-effort search, not a guarantee of equal starting positions or a mathematically optimal board. The production chart shows the result you actually get.
A board can have strong corners without giving just two or three spots an outsized advantage. This option favors enough mutually legal starting spots within one pip of the best for one per player. It penalizes the gap below the strongest group, with no hard cap on corner strength. It respects settlement spacing and only counts areas where starting settlements are allowed.
Resource balancing runs first. Starting-choice optimization then rearranges tokens without worsening that resource-balance score. On New Shores and Through the Desert, even-total-pip balancing slightly favors the starting island over the whole board. This is a pip-based, best-effort measure: it does not evaluate resource mix, harbor value, or both settlements through the snake draft.
Inventories and layouts follow the official 2020/2021 English rulebooks and 2023 extensions. Turning off red-token separation is a house-rule variant. Random harbor positions and resource balancing are optional setup variants. Fixed desert barriers and the ban on red tokens on gold in Through the Desert always apply.
Recommended tiles keep the printed terrain and numbers, overriding balancing. Conflicting placement settings produce an explanation. For New Shores with 5–6 players, the rulebook leaves the mainland variable; we use the base extension’s beginner layout there.
Comparing complete two-settlement starts could account for resource mix and draft order. Separating identical numbers could reduce reliance on one roll. Locking favorite tiles while rerolling the rest could help groups fine-tune an island.
Official rulebooks ↗ · Original inspiration ↗