Big Huge Games' XBLA title Catan is mentioned in Wired magazine's article "Monopoly Killer: Perfect German Board Game Refines Genre." Here's an excerpt...
Teuber created elaborate logic chains and probability matrices in a complex Excel spreadsheet so the videogame developers could see how every possible move and roll of the dice—from the impact of the Robber to the odds of getting wheat in a given scenario—compared. The end result was a sort of blueprint for the game that gave Big Huge Games a head start and showed just how complex the underlying math was. "It was the biggest, gnarliest spreadsheet I had ever seen," Reynolds says.