Real-Time Settlers of Catan | Hacker News Reader

Real-Time Settlers of Catan

robert.ocallahan.org

140 pointsIvoah89 comments

> Settlers of Catan is still a fine game, but can be tedious when you have to wait for other players to take long turns

One house rule we use that dramatically speeds up the game is open-hand resources. No more asking "Does anybody have...?" incessantly. Just look around and get ready for your trade. The bulk of game time is actually just trading.

We also remove the bandit and rolling an 7 is an automatic free resource for the roller and a re-roll. This helps unblock a lot of players in the beginning who are just sitting around waiting forever for a brick or similar.

With these changes games are easily 2x or 3x faster.

Wonder how that would mix with these real-time rules then. The blog post claims they can finish a "six-player Cities and Knights game in about 45 minutes". I doubt that would be 2x to 3x faster. But it might speed things up to take only half an hour.

I hate the 7 because it just adds too much randomness to a strategy game.

I don't mind leaving some room for the Fates to influence a game, considering you're not entirely dependent on luck. Skillful players will still do better in the long run and just as in life anybody can have good/bad luck. You could change the roll to something other than a 7 to keep some element of chance with lower odds of it being an factor.

Man I have had a significant number of games where I have had a robber block my resources to the point where my turn is just a roll and then pass... For like 4-5 full cycles. And at that point I am playing for silly self imposed goals or to allow the game to keep going for the other players... Not for my own enjoyment.

It’s not exclusively bad luck, but a combination of another player’s strategy and yours. You didn’t deem it important enough to have a Knight to defend against it.

I always think about how Catan was this huge boost to board games, and then most games post-Catan are like "there is no trading."

I enjoyed trading as a kid in Monopoly and friends but boy does it kill a game

My favorite game is still Pit. It's like Catan but with only the trading, and real-time!

I don’t understand catan’s appeal at all. It seems popular with a lot of people that aren’t at all interested in playing it at a deep level. Which is weird for such as long, involved game that has relatively little emergent gameplay.

Catan was many people’s first exposure to a strategic board game that isn’t elimination-based. When your idea of what a board game is is defined by games like Monopoly or Risk, Catan is revelatory in a way that makes you try to convince everyone to give it a try, and so it became relatively mainstream.

It also still has some stuff to munch on, despite the dice still playing a huge part. You can feel some sort of tactical positioning more or less impossible in a lot of classic board games.

Still kinda rough though

I guess that’s believable. I’m surprised it still holds such regard though. By current standards it feels like such a low bar

I leave my resources visible even if we aren't required to. It sometimes makes people more willing to trade with me, and I can still hide them late-game when players are getting more adversarial. Might not be the best strategy, but whatever.

IMO that would make certain aspects of the game quite different. Knowing which resources the other players have is an advantage (eg. when competing for the same spot) and open cards removes all the advantage (and challenge) of being good at keeping somewhat track of that.

Monopoly card becomes a lot easier to play optimally as well.

I usually advocate playing no-rob-on-2-point players. (taken from the xplorers online version)

If people are playing so carefully that they're constantly checking others' resources like this, it might actually be slower.

It just becomes part of the strategy.

Indeed, I prefer to openly display information that, were it kept nominally secret, could be determined anyway via lots of tedious bookkeeping.

Forensic accountants everywhere just let out a collective sigh

Makes sense. I don't find the idea of mentally tracking everyone's resources a particularly interesting or fun aspect of a game.

For standard Catan, the resources aren't quite perfectly determinable - when one player robs another, any players besides those two don't know which resource changed hands. There is a valid argument from that that resources should be fully concealed. Everybody can track how many of each resource currently exists in total, but they don't always know who holds which ones.

This was my staunch opinion for a long time, but I've actually come around to the idea that many games are improved by having some degree of hidden information which is in-theory trackable by players, since it allows a certain sort of player to take their turn much more rapidly (i.e. it mitigates "analysis paralysis"). I don't think it's true for every game, obviously, (IMO it would be a poor house rule to make in 1830, for instance), but I've become a lot more willing to trust designers' decisions on what information should be public vs. hidden as my taste in board games has developed over time.

(For the record, I have no opinion on the value of hidden vs public information as a design decision in Catan.)

I wonder how much you would enjoy (or hate) Bruno Faidutti's games, they are all about hidden information, scheming and bluffing.

"Maskerade" especially, because there you often don't even know for certain which character you are yourself. Everyone is just pretending, scheming and bluffing the time. Which I suppose really captures the idea of scheaming at Renaissance courts.

I've actually played a lot of Citadels (which I think is great fun these days, although I'll admit I disliked it when I first played it many years ago). I'll have to give Mascarade a shot, it looks like it would be engaging in the same sort of way.

Interesting twist. Our group would never have agreed to play open-handed resources. We were all bastards. IMO one of the best parts of the game was that opponent's hands were secret unless you went through the effort of keeping track of their hands. That information imbalance opened up many underhanded and shrewd trading strategies. We also would allow dishonorable trading, like offering a trade you couldn't fulfill, to goad your opponent into revealing whether he would take it, valuable information. We also allowed making side deals, like "trade me two stone and two wheat as a protection bribe and I'll never put the robber on you."

Did you also play with the development cards open-handed? That would be a twist, too, because a lot of the end game is about wondering whether or not your opponents' cards gave them points advantages, whether they were going for largest army, and so on.

> unless you went through the effort of keeping track of their hands

I just don't find card counting to be a very fun or useful game mechanic.

Can I take a pencil and paper to my games? Does this really enhance the strategy?

I’m not a catan player but I can’t imagine it’s not a hugely valuable piece of information

I don't see why it would be. You can easily determine what resources a player is likely to have, and what they need, by looking at the fully public board.

Here's a simple example where the certain knowledge of an opponent's hand comes in handy:

Player 1: "Hey, Player 2, I'll trade my wheat for your brick."

Player 2: "I don't have a brick."

Player 1 knows that Player 2 got two bricks and a wood 3 turns ago, and he bought a road. So the one card that's left over is a brick.

Player 1: "OK, I play a knight development card, I move the robber to your plot, and I take your card. Lo and behold, it's a brick!"

You'll get the same effect by just looking at the board and noting who has the brick production.

No, you won't. It's entirely possible to have brick production but no brick right now. Have you ever even played Catan? This is basic stuff.

And by tracking the cards you’ll have a better model. You seem to be agreeing that this information is useful

I'm not, really; the normal mode is that you offer to buy something and you get it or not. But if you want the information, it's publicly available in high but not perfect fidelity, making tracking hands even less valuable than otherwise.

So do you show everyone your cards to speed it up because you think them knowing offers nothing useful?

One reason I stopped playing games like Hearthstone was because everyone brought a bot to the game to track cards, and I found the experience was a lot worse after using one.

My house rule to fix Settlers of Catan is to play other, better games.

i just played it for the first time and i can instantly relate to your points! i struggled for bricks too and just kept losing cards before i could put them to good use.

it is due to bandit that most people hide their resources, so removing it is a must if you want transparent trading.

Hello, I'm Demi from https://colonist.io team.

I love this. It feels like what Bananagram did to scrabble.

Scrabble -> Waiting turns

Bananagram -> Everyone plays at the same time

The difference in fun is 10x.

We will use your app to see how it plays out. We might just end up implementing it :)

Cesar from the https://woogles.io team - bananagrams is definitely not nearly as fun as Scrabble :)

They're just different. I never play Scrabble with friends because it's too serious and competitive. Banana grams is light and fun and unpredictable.

I once did something in a similar vein, but with much less sophistication. We had 8 players and 2 copies of Catan. The games were played simultaneously and the rule was that the first player to win a game was the overall winner. Everyone was very motivated to play frantically!

lol, simplicity is a hallmark of genius

Brilliant.

Was kind of hoping this was browser based version of the game. I have no friends to play with ha

I searched apparently ‘Space Alert’ is the most popular real time board game? Can anyone vouch or recommend one that is known for being real time?

I've played 5-minute dungeon. It's fun.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamemechanic/2831/real-time

Galaxy trucker has a good app and would recommend it both on mobile and in real life. Sidereal Confluence is highly complicated, high investment game that's based on frantic negotiation, I can't recommend it unless you're seriously into games.

https://colonist.io is the browser version of Catan. I play it often!

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamecategory/1037/real-time/l...

Not The most popular though, according to this list. From the top 10 I only played Galaxy Truckers and Space Alert, both of which I really enjoyed.

Space Alert is silly and fun and cooperative. Everyone also is forced to mention Galaxy Trucker as it’s also silly and fun, but the real time nature is quite isolated, and I prefer interactive games. Trading games like Chinatown and Sidereal Confluence often have real time phases for deal-making, of those two Sidereal is the better game by far but Chinatown is the one you’ll actually play. Finally no real time board game list is complete without Captain Sonar, a hyper-competitive 4v4 game of submarine warfare.

If you consider simultaneous turns as a restrained form of real time, then ‘tabletop moba’ Guards of Atlantis 2 is really quite good.

Galaxy trucker is so dull! Can never see the appeal.

Whereas I never really get sick of space Alert. It's tricky and engaging and interesting and depends a lot on the group.

Space Alert is indeed realtime. I bought Millennium Blades and made one attempt to play it which didn't go terribly well. Galaxy Trucker, as others have mentioned, is great.

Edit: There's also a star-trek pastiche game with two teams that was big a few years back, I never liked it but people enjoy it, can't remember the name.

In my humble opinion, Space Alert can't be beat. Just prepare to explode a lot; like any good co-op, there's a learning curve. After you get hooked, get the expansion, which comes with an addictive character progression system with achievements (and ridiculously hard threats, for good measure).

I really wish there was a version 2 or something. There are lots of annoying quirks in space Alert which could be improved, like the interceptors which never get used. And the lack of any proper difficulty settings.

I'd love a proper Legacy style version of it. I bought the expansion but it seems to add a lot of complication without enough value.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/312804/pendulum is real-time worker-placement. It's pretty good and fun, as long as you can trust everyone not to cheat (even by accident), and if you get sand timers that don't quietly stick when you're not looking at them. Warning: The rulebook suggests learning the mechanics via a turn-based "non-real-time" variant which my wife and I actually found more confusing than just jumping right into the sand-timer-based full game. My advice is to jump right in.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31481/galaxy-trucker is of course fantastic. But more than 50% of the game is not real-time and, as in several Vlaada Chvatil games (e.g. Dungeon Lords), you have to enjoy kind of watching the game play itself for a while.

Of course there are also many party games involving a real-time deadline, such as https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/219215/werewords and https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/134352/two-rooms-and-a-b... .

Space Alert is probably the most highly regarded among board game aficionados, but not the most popular. It's complex and stressful, so not everyone's cup of tea.

The most popular real-time board games are probably Set and Bananagrams.

All three of these games are great, I'd recommend any of them that look appealing to you and that you think you can convince people to play.

This is cool. I am going to try it with my kids next time we play.

It also reminds me of a free to play online settlers of catan game from 15-20 years ago. There was no time limit on turns, so people could just grief the game by going AFK.

Dev Cards Roll Robber / Pirate (if applies) Dev Cards 2 Trading Building / Buying Dev Cards 3

In Conflict alway let the priority player go first. ON 7 move the priority indicator and new priority player moves robber / priate.

I enjoyed the FAQ on resolving conflicts - basically don't be a dick, resolve the few conflicts that may arise by friendly consensus (or at worst flip a coin)

RTS Catan is just Age of Empires 2 with fewer steps :P

Important number to put after the game title. OG's know. Not 3, not 4. 2.

Nah man AoE 3 is where it's at. The only real problem with it was the home city system, and then only for multiplayer (I thought it was alright in single player).

AoE 2 is like a 1965 Mustang Shelby while AoE 3 is like an RX-7 Veilside. Both really awesome in their own different ways.

Great idea! Ive modified almost every tabletop and CCG Ive played, mostly for speed or solo play against "table top ai".

What are simple realtime boardgames?

Escape: Curse of the Temple is probably the best balance of good and simple realtime board game.

Captain Sonar is the one you will actually convince people to play though, because it is conceptually cool, even if it's kind of meaningless.

What are you talking about? The real time component is extremely important to captain sonar. The essence of the game is a rush to figure out your opponent’s location and then capitalize on it while they panic.

I like the game. I’m saying it’s not a meaningful strategy game. It’s basically competitive dice rolling. Escape, by comparison, is literally rolling dice. But you have to make some real decisions. Anyway, they’re both good, and people should try both.

I’m confused by what you possibly mean by “escape is literally rolling dice” when there is no dice in the game or source of randomness.

Magic Maze is a great one!

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/209778/magic-maze

Bananagrams, as mentioned in other comments, is real-time scrabble. I guess "boggle" is a similar much older precursor

Set. Or if you'd like that but faster and dumber, Pick A Pig

Kites if you'd like a cooperative one.

The title made me think of a real settlement on a real island. Nonetheless very interesting.

if you're into catan,these videos from a diamond player are a must-watch

https://www.youtube.com/@Jooglish-zd3jh

Are you that player? :P

much more popular and a regional champion - https://www.youtube.com/@DyLightedCatan

Slightly ot any interesting boards game you can recommend for a couple?

I went through boardgame geek a while back picking out all the top games with ideal players of two and a low complexity; The ones we liked the most:

  * Jaipur
  * Azul
  * Seven Wonders Duel
  * Five Tribes
  * Splendor

Tokaido duo Splendor duel A little wordy Patchwork Jaipur Sky Team

Raccoon Tycoon is great for 2-5 and I can’t recommend it enough.

* Race for the Galaxy * Roll for the Galaxy * Azul

I really enjoy board game adaptation of Dorfromantik. Its a rather relaxing co-op game. There's also a "Duel" version of the game were two players (or teams) compete by playing with the same sequence of tiles. :)

I absolutely adore Hanabi, especially for two players. It's a cooperative game with very limited communication.

Also another vote for Splendor Duel. The original Splendor is probably my favorite game and Duel is the better version for two players.

Blokus Duo

We like:

Seven Wonders Duel

Jaipur

Wingspan

Pan Am

My partner and I have played dozens of games of Spirit Island, far and away our most-played board game

If you are okay with a deck-building card game, we like Dominion a lot (https://www.riograndegames.com/games/dominion/)

The game objective is to use the rotating 10 types of cards in the middle and always available upgraded coins to buy victory points. Can be very strategic with two players and is lots of fun because the 10 cards in the middle always change game to game. With even 1 expansion it really improves the flavor.

Splendour Duel and 7 Wonders Duel are actually better than their originals.

Patchwork is a great older game for 2.

This looks great. I wonder what other games it could be applied to.

If you need free and best version of Catan, you can play https://pioneers.game

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