Hacker News Reader

Comment by declan_roberts | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com