The other night I witnessed a game of Settlers of Catan for the very first time. It looked a little different from most other board games I’ve seen in my short seventeen years here but, as Moyee predicted, I picked it up pretty quickly. Ever since that fateful night I’ve been playing almost nothing but Settlers (and some Ridge Racer).
The basic premise of the game is to earn victory points. This can be a done in a variety of ways, such as making the longest road or playing the most “soldier cards.” You’ll also get points for holding special development cards or for building settlements and cities. Of course, this would be an insanely boring game if that was all there was to it.
The real charm of the game comes with the limited nature of resources in this game and the barter-centered gameplay. Unlike (but indirectly related to) Monopoly’s “Grab $200 at Go” way of distributing cash, players get income (i.e. resource cards) from rolling two dice and having a settlement or city next to a resource panel numbered with the sum of the two dice.** In this way, it’s sort of like the board game, Risk (or so I’ve been told: I’ve never actually played Risk). Anyway, there’s almost no way to have sufficient amounts of all the resources you’ll need to bust out that n00bcake all over your opponents, so the only real way to be successful is to work selfishly towards your own ends by trading with others, indirectly fueling their needs. This is the heart of the fun of Settlers, IMO.
It’s pretty difficult to describe to people who have never played it before and have never seen a game before, but I promise you it’s addicting if you happen to like being forced to change strategies every game and thinking ahead a few steps.
For everyone wanting to play a single player versus computers version of the game, feel free to download this file (~7 MB) for installation and crack. I’m still looking for some hot and heavy human (Settlers) action so maybe this Wednesday after LoaH.
** My now former economics teacher Mr. Messere used to always quote the “Monopoly Effect” as an illustration for the phenomenon of inflation. It’s, in his words, “Too much money chasing too few goods.” I’m sorry, that will be all the economics schooling for this fine near-the-end of summer day.
EDIT: As mentioned in the comments section, there is an online version of Settlers (one that I thought was supposed to be really ugly but isn’t actually) called Cities3D. I played a total of three rounds of Settlers last night (3 way match) with Adwin and Adrian. Adrian has got either some amazing luck or insane skill because he won every match (the last one was really close though). To play Cities3D you’ll also need to grab Hamachi, which allows for a virtual LAN connection to the rest of us (server: “Settlers!”, password: “Adwin”).