---
title: "DeepSeek V4.1 Flash plays Catan against GPT-5.6"
date: 2026-09-15
canonical: https://solmaz.io/x/2099765642761277665/
x_url: https://x.com/onusoz/status/2099765642761277665
license: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
---

I made DeepSeek V4.1 Flash play Settlers of Catan against GPT-5.6 Luna/Terra/Sol in 16 games, with different thinking settings

DeepSeek was on Novita through Hugging Face Inference Providers

DS beats Luna EASY

Against Terra, games that finalized end up being a 4-4 tie --- while costing 6~7x LESS

And Sol generally beat DS, but DS was still able to beat Sol 1 time (Whereas it seemed like Luna had no chance against DS)

I tried to run 2 games where both DS and Terra had `max` thinking, but those games took too long and did not finalize

Not the most rigorous benchmark runs I have done. But I can say that, both in subjective agentic coding performance and Catan-wise, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash sits somewhere between GPT 5.6 Terra and Sol, while costing a lot less than Terra

If this gets enough interest, I will do more runs and might even RL a smaller model to beat all of them 😎

Inspect the runs yourself: https://huggingface.co/buckets/osolmaz/catanarchy-runs
The harness and game simulator I have built: