Creator of Catan, Klaus Teuber, has died
dicebreaker.com
dicebreaker.com
My favorite mechanic is the way each dice roll potentially gives everyone at the table some sort of payoff. This keeps everyone at the table engaged and paying attention.
You only come up with mechanics like this if you put in the time playtesting.
[*] RIP
We've actually found this to be very off-putting. It often ends up with certain players remaining stuck in long droughts, often unable to do anything.
As a result, we tend to play with "welfare". Essentially, a secondary currency system that can be exchanged for any resource. Cost scales with the amount of victory points you have, so it becomes less valuable as you advanced closer to victory.
We've found this helps create a bit of balance and ensure that everyone has a chance to stay engaged.
However, I can't get my group to play it. They say that the actual process of rolling the dice is fun. I tend to agree.
Not sure if there’s an English version. It’s similar to catan, but you have a bit more control over your course
same here. There were (online/zoom) games where I spent like 15~20 minutes on twitter, and just clicking 'roll' on my turn because I could never do anything
I prefer ticket-to-ride, where I can always buy a card or two, and always (after buying enough), put some trains on the board.
We also play a lot of Pan-Am recently.
If you put those initial settlements on 2 intersections that happen to restrict you to only rolls of 3, 6, and 9 you're in for a world of hurt even though 6 and 9 aren't "bad" numbers per se.
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/150443/famous-welfare-varia...
Basically, if your turn comes back around and you haven't gained a resource, you can pick any resource up.
Sure, if you put your villages on the 2 and 12 you’ll have a really hard time ever getting anything.
If you’re anywhere in the 5-9 range you’ll almost always have something every round.
While dice rolls follow predictable distribution, in aggregate, they do not do so in the micro environment. You can end up on droughts on "statistically common" numbers.
We've found this is further compounded by the fact that some resources will naturally end up with poor numbers on them. You might have a game where there's only one good "brick" hex, but two people have commandeered it. That resource becomes so valuable, that you can never acquire it.
While you can technically trade to the bank, the 7 rule means it's hard to acquire enough cards to make the trade.
I find the variance here way too high. Coupled with being a long game, this essentially bums out a few of the players who end up missing out in resources in early or mid-game and then just stagnating and getting bored. When I'm forced to play the game, I've played by taking the average of a set of dice rolls (essentially shaping your result into a distribution that approaches normal as you have more rolls) but honestly I just don't bother playing Catan when given the choice.
I certainly credit Catan for being my cohort's gateway into the world of board games, a lifelong hobby, and for that Mr. Teuber has my eternal gratitude.
Curious - what is your go-to board game?
I've learned the fun of social deception games with friends fades rather fast, as in the replayability feels low. At least in my case, that is.
I don't have a regular group, and so I play with mostly casual players. The intricacies of role-based play is somewhat lost.
IME, at best, it's fun the first time or two, but at worst, it's frustrating to be deceived and can become emotionally taxing.
boardgamearena.com is a great way to try out lots of games.
Incidentally, boardgamearena supports both single-tile and three-tile hands,
Of the classic "gateway" games, I personally would recommend Ticket to Ride or Carcassonne. The former is about collecting cards of the right colour in order to build rail lines across America (or Europe or various other countries), while hoping nobody else tries to get in your way. Carcassonne is a tile laying game where you're trying to build and claim features in a pastoral medieval landscape, which feels like it should be pleasant but can be brutal!
If you want to see how good board games can look, I personally really like Wingspan. It's a game of collecting birds, and includes a huge stack of cards, each of which is a different, beautifully illustrated bird with unique features that relate to the bird's real life traits. It's a bit more complicated than some of the other games here, but also very satisfying when you can figure out how to fit all your bird powers together and create something very powerful.
The other thing I'd recommend is not so much a game as a mechanic, and that's deck building games. The idea is that you start each game with a small deck of cards and play them. Playing the cards generally allows you to buy more cards which you then eventually shuffle into your deck, making your deck stronger over time. I really like these sorts of games because you have such a satisfying feeling of building up cards that work well together and then playing them in a single giant combo.
Dominion is the oldest, and probably the best example of deckbuilding, it's very simple conceptually, but it's very deep, and you can also play it for free online if you want to try it out. There's lots of other variations on this theme though, and I've heard good things about Clank! where you're simultaneously trying to build your deck and sneak through a dragon's lair. If you are a fan of Harry Potter, there's also a Harry Potter deckbuilding game where the players are working together rather than competing, which is really well tutorialised.
Speaking of cooperative games, this is another genre that I didn't really think about before getting into board games. There are a lot of games here depending on what you're into, but Pandemic is a good starting point: you're working together to cure four diseases that are infecting the globe, you need to simultaneously be clearing up infected regions, but also researching cures so you can win the game. It's fun, thematic, and very tense. Alternatively, if you like puzzles, card games, and tense silence, The Crew is a very simple trick-taking card game where you're working together with the other players, but you're not allowed to talk to each other, so the only way you can communicate is by the cards you put down. If you're used to card games, it'll click very quickly, but even if you aren't, the concept is fairly intuitive.
There are a whole bunch of other games that I want to mention but I've already written a long enough comment! I think the best way to get into board games is to try a few games out and see what works for you and what doesn't. There are people out there who exclusively play intense simulations of 1800s rail stock exchanges, and people who just want to place pretty tiles in the right places; there is really something for everyone! If you want more places to try out games, you can often play virtually with tools like Tabletop Simulator or Boardgame Arena, or sometimes there's a local library or board game group or game shop where you can try before you buy.
All those you always have something to do, which is my main gripe with Catan, where some games can be A LOT of fun, and some others, you would rather be watching paint dry.
I think after some reflection I know what you mean about the variance of "stuff to do" from game to game in Catan. We don't play much anymore, as I prefer asymmetry, but I have such fond memories of it, I was just curious.
It's also a fairly rare characteristic despite two of the largest tabletop games ever, Catan and Monopoly, having versions of it.
Machi Koro is an excellent more modern game with the same characteristic.
Settlers is like a gateway drug to so many good games.
Then due to the 'robber' mechanic you cannot follow any strategy, since you randomly lose resources.
To add more: trade is almost never worth it. I think some expansion introduced small currency coins to try to facilitate more trade.
After 2-3 hours the game ends since somoene managed to buy the cards that give victory points. This didnt happen due to any grand strategy, they were just lucky not to lose their resources to the robber. Those cards are a built in timer.
Cathan could have been good in 1995, but now mechanically the game is very outdated and there are much better 'gateway' games. For example Carcassonne, which has very elegant mechanics.
Cathan has this problem that your decision options are very limited: trade is often worth it only for one side - so the common strategy is to never trade; then you cannot do any long term strategy, since if you try to accumulate resources you randomly lose them to the robber.
Yes, if you play badly initially it effects your entire game and you'll probably lose but I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that is true for a lot of games.
Catan is an excellent game; it's nicely balanced between luck, persuasion when it comes to trading, territorial maneuvering, resource acquisition, and so on …
Went down a huge rabbit hole afterwards and most of my closest friends today I've met through game nights, and I've designed several games since that will eventually get out there (one is signed by a publisher but not yet released, hoping to get two more signed this year).
If not for that I'd probably still exclusively be working on video games in my spare time.
Thanks Klaus, for having such a massive influence on the hobby that the industry has had an incredible period of growth and many cool and interesting games that almost certainly wouldn't exist otherwise. RIP.
Gonna have to gather together a group to play a round in his honor.
Not sure what is special about "dicebreaker.com" but here's an official announcement from the Catan site https://www.catan.com/catan-fans/news/we-mourn-passing-klaus... as well as a memorial on the Spiel des Jahres site https://www.spiel-des-jahres.de/trauer-um-klaus-teuber/ though that one is in German.
Catan is game that scratches my game geek itch, but is fun and learnable by most people interested in a board game at a holiday. I am thankful for Catan. Thank you Klaus Teuber for bringing us Catan.
There are lots of games that are "tabletop games" and not "board games," and not because anyone's being a snob.
Dominoes, cards, miniatures, for example. If you actually dig deeper into BGG than the links of new hotness, you can find many more types.
Also, anyone who's into Catan hasn't earned their snob status yet. ;-)
Thankfully this whole hobby is as strong as it ever has been, giving folks lots of options that suit their tastes.
Playing with three mostly fixes it, but then there are fewer people to trade with. Using a set, balanced board layout can help, but IMO gets kinda boring.
The reactions to doing moves that only hurt them, which otherwise have no personal gain and often cost you future opportunity, are absolutely priceless.
- Robber can only target equal or higher VPs
- Building a road within 2 lengths of opponent's settlement, and not in equal proximity to yours, induces a toll of one resource.
Or with the seafarers expansion! It's an almost perfect expansion to an already excellent game.
Playing with Helpers also modifies the game enough to try more strategies if you are stuck. The "Marianne" helper, for example, can really be a saving grace during a sequence of bad rolls for you.
All other things being equal, the optimal placement of the robber is to impact the person on your right. This makes it longer before the person can retaliate against you (if retaliation is part of the way people play).
I had a couple trading dishwashing chores for sheep. No.
It was my turn and it was clear that one person would win this round if no one won before him. So I made a hail-mary trade with someone else that gave me the slightest chance of winning, but it failed to do so. And of course, that person I made the trade with ended up winning because of my trade. We never played again.
I’ve played far more aggressive and complex games where we routinely turn on each other and we just have a laugh and keep playing.
In all games, within game contexts, you may only do things expressly allowed by the rules. This is what it means to have rules; it is the covenant you have agreed to by agreeing to play. You can play tic-tac-toe in a van while yodeling, but putting a Z in a box is out of the question. It is not up to any rulebook to say that you can't use a memory aid; rather it is up to the rulebook to specifically allow it, or else you can't use one. It doesn't matter how much the game for you is not about this memorization, how much the memory thing seems tangential to whatever fun the game provides; you do not get to use anything other than your brain to handle that memorization, unless of course you are explicitly playing a variant. You also do not get to - and this is important - scrawl notes to yourself on your belly using your own blood. Games between players are played between players, and "players" do not by default include notebooks or pencils, even makeshift ones that are constructed from the players. Expecting all rulebooks to repeat this is nonsense, and anyway would offend people who don't like to talk about blood.
Go explain to little Sally that she can't count on her fingers, because only her brain is allowed. Go tell players that they shouldn't fiddle with meeps because that could be a notation tool. No fun allowed, we're playing board games here.
And then come back and keep playing.
My life would have been so different without Mr Teuber creations. Thank you and reset in peace.
My kids and I just got it out again a few days ago and started playing again. What a great game. RIP.
Most board game aficionados end up not playing Catan very much, but it's hard to think of a game that has introduced more people to the genre successfully.
I like long complex games that make Catan look like Go Fish.
I have played regularly with a group of friends for years now both in person and online. They're slightly less hardcore.
Catan is one of the games we constantly have running turn based. It never gets old.
It's the perfect balance of strategy, luck, complexity, and fun.
There is even a junior version that says it is for ages 6+. I admittedly have never played it but have heard that it can work for some smart 4 year olds with a little guidance.
What are some good games you would recommend?
- take 30-90 minutes on average, not hours or days
- have a relatively simple set of rules without too many special cases
I'd suggest that the super complicated/involved are just one niche that some people are into. And much like books or movies, different people are different things.
Well played
Love Bonanza too!
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I stopped playing Catan and switched to cooperative euro games after realizing that the way I play Catan (threatening, holding grudges, taking revenge, creating chaos...) is not how everybody else plays or wants to play. I play to win whatever the cost, but after having strong arguments with my friends and loved ones I decided to just stop playing.
https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/omr-podcast/id10563120...
It's my favorite board game to this day.
In the 90s when "Die Siedler" was released, we played it until we literally dropped due to exhaustion. :) It is still so much fun. Settlers is one of the all time classics which I guess will still be played in a 100 years.
I am a GM for a long lasting, weekly online RPG campaign, and when one of the other players is not available we usually "meet" anyway and just play one of the dozens games available there.
One of the best games, I enjoy playing that l for hours with my kids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Settlers_of_Catan_(novel)
The Elasunders encounter a large flock of white ravens, which they ecstatically interpret as a good omen from the god Odin. The white ravens evoke their well-known Legend of Catan, leading them to believe that Catan is the shore they now walk upon.
Shortly after landing, Candamir's slave-girl Gunda bears him his first-born child, Nils, whom he names after his sister Asta's deceased husband.
... Osmund and Candamir both are attracted to Siglind, but she has devoted herself to the Christian God. Osmund proposes marriage to her, but she refuses, saying she has sworn off all men.
Osmund instead marries Inga, a 13-year-old girl. Brigitta, Osmund's grandmother-in-law from his first marriage, deems them anointed and secretly prophesies to them that their firstborn will be king of Catan. Furthermore, Inga is to one day take Brigitta's place as the priestess of their religion, while Osmund will be ruler of the island.
Oh, c'mon it's a joke. There was no such thing as a "Protestant" in Anglo Saxon times.