Perfect German Board Game Redefines Genre | Hacker News Reader

Perfect German Board Game Redefines Genre

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181 pointsnadim82 comments

Have I entered some sort of time warp? I was introduced to this game at the gaming club at Cornell. In 1997.

When reading this article I had to keep looking up at the dateline to make sure I hadn't accidentally slipped back into graduate school. Talk about existential terror.

The moral of this story is threefold. First: I was a much bigger game geek than I ever thought I was. Second: Your business can take a really long time to reach its full potential. Third: Just because something is old news to you doesn't mean that there aren't lots of people encountering it for the first time.

I was never a board game geek, but that might have been a side effect of growing up in the 90's. I had friends who I couldn't hang out with every day, because we lived so far apart. So I ended up being killer at early video games and for the most part I still am although I rarely play the first person shooters or the RTS games anymore due to time (and, for the FPS', interest) constraints.

Yet even I knew what Catan is. Even my wife does, I told her about 3 months ago that the next time we waste money on a board game we're actually going to get one I like, so I pointed it out to her.

So even for me that was a sort of bizarre 'deja vu' experience. Then again, I grew up in the UK so I suppose this game probably hit the market much bigger and much sooner than in the US. I guess an addendum to your second moral is that foreign markets can act in unexpected ways.

No, you're not alone. I've been playing Settlers for years, and it's long been a favorite of a number of friends of mine in different cities who don't all know each other. Perhaps it's been a niche game this whole time and will go "mainstream", but its niche hasn't been that obscure.

Not that this isn't some sort of time-warp article, but haven't you learned by now that Cornell has little in common with reality? We even put it on a bumper sticker. :-)

Here's one thing that stuck out to me, his iteration and testing on real people:

"""Every once in a while, he would bring the new game upstairs to test it out on his family. They would play along, but Teuber could tell that the game wasn't working. Sometimes, in the middle of a match, he would notice his youngest son, Benny, reading a comic under the table. Other times his wife would suddenly remember a load of laundry that needed immediate attention. After each of these sessions, Teuber would haul the game back downstairs for further refinement. He repeated this process over the course of four years."""

Of course! Games are essentially just user interface - imagine if your software product didn't _have_ an underlying set of tasks that had to be accomplished, or even a mental model on the user's part of what was being done. How much more important would UI testing be?

As one of several game makers on HN, I want to take issue with the idea that "games are essentially just user interface." Games almost always present an interface to an underlying system. Many games have an underlying system that is not particularly simple or intuitive and take significant effort to learn. And, because unlike tools, they do not offer to assist the user in doing something that she already knows she wants to do, we often provide many more incentives along the way, as struggling with a system is often not amusing, and amusement is usually the goal.

This is all to say that the UI is very important, but to consider games as chiefly UI is to fundamentally misunderstand what games are and how we interact with them.

bendoct, I'm looking to create an informal group for game hackers/makers. Email me if you're interested. Ditto for anyone else interested.

peter [at] pchristensen [dot] com

Yeah, my statement's only true in certain senses. It might be more accurate, with tabletop games at least, to say that games are a UI to the other players - that is, they channel social interactions in certain ways.

this is my feeling. the games that last are ones that distill some aspect of friendly competition between people. and the very best games are the ones that cause you to interact with your friends in some new way (games that involve auctions or mini-economies tend to do this well)

I'm sorry I can only upvote you once.

I was about to cut and paste this very section. that is some serious user testing / design!

What jumped out at me was that his wife and children tolerated it for four years.

He was already making money with his other games.

If you're playing this game without the "Penny Rule", you're missing out.

SoC suffers from a bit of a compound interest effect: a few bad (non-producing) rolls at the beginning can screw you for the entire game.

To make up for this:

Anytime there is a roll on which a given player doesn't get any resources (and not because of the thief), they are given a penny.

During trading, a player can buy a resource from the bank using pennies for the cost of number of victory points showing.

This dramatically reduces run-away-winner syndrome.

That's a great design hack. Did you come up with it?

If only someone could do something similar for mana drought/flood, Magic would be a pretty good game.

I'm not the originator. But I am a convert!

It's nice. It reminds me of the "square root" hack for Gin Rummy, from the guy who came up with the card game Ambition.

Square-root hack is as follows: regular rounds are scored on the square root (rounding down) of the deadwood difference, capped at 5 points. Undercuts get a bonus of 3, plus the square root of the differential. Gin scores 4 plus the square root of the opponent's deadwood. So the ranges are:

Regular: 1-5 Undercut: 3-6 Gin: 5-13

The victory condition is to have win a round when you have at least 20 points, and you are in the lead.

Second-turn Gin is extremely rare, but first- or second-turn knock is not rare. With the regular system, a second-turn knock (pure luck) can be a 60+ round, and that's more than half the game. With this system, it's only 5 points.

Mulligans are built into tournament rules.

That being said, I find that they are quite the leveler; high tempo decks with less lands suffer less than a control deck, but need mulligans more often. It's a trade-off, and evens out the playing field more than people realize.

Even with mulligans, I'd argue that mana screw is one of the biggest failings of M:tG. Make your best estimate of what percentage of games you think are decided by mana screw or mulligan-reduced hands, then ask: "Is that too high?"

In my experience, it was about 1/3. Then again, I wasn't a great player.

In 2003, I came up with a Magic-like game that solved a lot of these problems. It wasn't a kill-your-opponent game, but a German-style TCG with a Victory Point (VP) system, making it more amenable to multiplayer games. There were no "life points", but you had Action and Focus points that you could use to draw extra cards or resources, to give creatures an advantage in combat (making it more nondeterministic), etc. The number of strategic options per turn was vastly greater than in Magic, so it was harder for a player to get "stuck" and unable to do something useful.

Unfortunately, at the time I knew nothing about programming, nor had any money (I was 20). It was pretty obvious that the only way the game had a shot would be to take it online. Now I could hack it up, but I've forgotten most of the mechanics.

The disadvantage of this game, and why I think it wouldn't have ever taken off the way M:tG did is that, despite having "better" design from a Euro-style perspective, it wasn't a game that would finish within 30 minutes. A turn involved multiple players (most phases of turns were concurrent) and had a lot more strategic options than Magic's "untap, draw, cast, attack" formula that describes 90% of turns, so a single turn would last 3-10 minutes.

We play with this but only on building victory points. Victory chits, largest army and longest road don't count towards the number of victory points. I don't know where this started but it has made for alot better games.

Is that the cost of the player's victory points, or the sum of all points on the table?

We play with all of the player's showing victory points.

I agree with a lot of other commenters here that Catan is luck-driven and essentially over (except for a lot of tedious listening to people tell you _again_ that they don't have the resource cards you want) after you make your initial placements. What deserves more attention, though, are the ways in which "worse is better" applies here - the specific things about Catan that make hardcore gamers dislike it are, in many cases, the things that make it popular.

For instance, lots of people like to feel that when they win, it's because they were skillful, and when they lose, it's only because they were unlucky. On the other hand, if you really _are_ investing your skills in your decisions but still lose due to luck, you'll be really frustrated. Catan does an excellent job of keeping players busy, but essentially on an equal footing of powerlessness. On this basis it really appeals to people who get all kinds of nervous when asked to play any kind of game of skill with friends.

A better game for that group would be Fluxx (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/258) -> lots of fun, interesting decisions, but a massive element of luck. In Fluxx, if you know what you're doing and get lucky, you can win extremely fast. If you don't get lucky, though, you're stuck. I've found that people interested in a light-weight game always end up liking it.

Ugg, seems like everyone has a copy of fluxx and while it might take no time to teach or setup it is really not that good of a game unless you are seriously drunk.

...except that many non-gamers are really flummoxed by the way Fluxx's changing goals keep putting different demands on them. They feel like the rug's been pulled out from under them, when really all that's happening is they're playing a game that's all tactics and no strategy.

"if you know what you're doing and get lucky, you can win extremely fast."

I would turn that around. The luck factor in Fluxx is staggeringly high. However, what makes Fluxx fun is that it does not make any attempt whatsoever to hide that fact.

My problem with SoC is that it has a very high luck factor, but that the game also tries very hard to hide that fact. The expansion Cities and Knights or using a deck of cards with the dicerolls make SoC bearable.

Randomness provides variance, which is essentially the range of opponent skill levels you can compete with. GoFish has high variance so anyone can play against anyone else (but is so random as to not be very fun) while chess has no variance so the better player almost always wins (also not fun, unless you match up well).

While unpopular with skill players, variance is handy in casual games like Catan because it broadens the range of people you can play with. Variance in the form of mana-screw in Magic does the same thing, with the bonus of allowing you to compete with a wider range of skill and money levels.

Variance is a great concept, thanks for bringing it to my attention!

I've played Catan with cards instead of dice- you have 36 cards, each with a number that can be attained by rolling two dice. How many times a number appears in the deck is its odds of being rolled. Statistically, you will roll 7 6/36 times, so there are 6 sevens in the deck. There is only one 2 and one 12 because their odds are 1/36. You shuffle the deck, and draw a card instead of rolling (once you go through the deck, you just reshuffle). This means that luck plays into when you will get a resource, but not if you will.

Flattening the bell curve can help a good deal, but the only way to guarantee that you get a resource each turn is to redraw until you hit a match with one of your settlements... unless I'm misunderstanding you.

edit: NM, I misread your last sentence. I've never seen a territory run dry for the whole game, but this would indeed prevent that.

Anyone interested in board games should check out http://www.boardgamegeek.com. It's an amazing resource.

Why is there still no usable way for me to add my collection of games to BoardGameGeek? I've got to load the page for each game I own and click "I own this" separately. Even for a modest-sized collection like mine, this is enough to stop me from using what's obviously a tremendously powerful community tool.

They just redesigned the backend; hopefully this'll make changes like that easier. Personally, every so often I want to make my own version, but the user data on BGG is so useful, I think it might keep others out of the market.

I was introduced to Catan during college and we quickly had a weekly game going. The interplay of luck and skill is intrinsically woven into the gameplay, which kept things very dynamic. The "wheeling/dealing" aspect of the bartering keeps things interesting when it isn't your turn.

Just when things would get boring on the skills side (someone was far ahead of everyone else), luck would rush in to make things interesting. Just when things would get boring on the luck side (a series of bad rolls), there would be opportunities to strategize around it.

I haven't played it in years, though (not near that group of people anymore), so it was a pleasure to see this pop up on HN. And it is pretty relevant insofar as the "programming" and game loop is quite clever.

There are some great online versions too (asobrain, jsettlers, etc... would provide links but I don't know what the best online versions are today).

You can't figure out, what game the article is talking about until you finish reading a lot of text. So here is the link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlers_of_Catan

It's called Settlers of Catan.

And it's a great game. There's also a decent version you can download for XBox 360:

http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/puzzle/catan/index.html

Huge boardgame fan checking in. Settlers makes for a great "gateway game," a way to introduce non-gamers to the world of eurogames, but most hardcore gamers in my crowd find it a little too luck driven. We tend to prefer games like Agricola, Powergrid, Caylus, and El Grande these days. But I still think it's a pretty good game.

If you're new to boardgames and like Settlers, I recommend going to BGG (boardgamegeek.com) and checking out their list of the top 20 or so games and trying some of those.

If you're looking for people to play with, there are a number of active boardgame Meetups. You can also check out http://www.brettspielwelt.de/, which is a German site with a lot of popular boardgames available for online play.

Happy gaming!

I learned how to play this a few weeks ago. I had no idea at the time that I was playing a "perfect" board game!

Seriously, though. It was just okay. The game always ended just when things were getting interesting.

You need to play with the 'cities and knights' extension. It makes the game more complex. Also try the board game Puerto Rico, which we're just getting into but seems pretty awesome.

Does it reduce the luck element a little? We have the base game and the Seafarers expansion, and we got a little bored with it. The key seems to be picking the right starting positions, the rest is mostly plain luck. (and relentless trading of resources)

I think they redesigned the game recently, so it's possible the new version of the expansions won't work with our original edition anyway.

These days, we're mostly into Puerto Rico, Ticket to Ride (various editions), Carcassonne (also somewhat luck-based), Power Grid/Funkenschlag and Agricola.

Seafarers just makes the game bigger. Cities & Knights makes it more complex (as well as making it bigger).

But does it add more depth of strategy/tactics? Complex rules don't mean it's not still primarily luck.

C&K basically gives players more ways to affect the game's outcome through actual decisions (more of which are sorely needed). I haven't played it myself so I can't say how effective they are, but it's a step.

I've played Cities and Knights, and I like it a lot better. The progress cards let you affect trade, other players, or speed development, and offer some additional strategy. The aqueduct ability (#3, paper) even minimizes the effect of a dice-induced resource shortage. The constant threat of barbarian invasion always results in a race for knights, and the accompanying strategies of trying to one-up the other guy.

Cities and knights is my favorite extension.

You should buy such extensions if you have played the basic game a lot.

Games also last longer with this extension, count on 3 to 4 exciting hours.

Since I'm on hackernews, I've always wondered when this game would pop up and what other board games you would advise. I'll have a look at Puerto Rico asap.

Board games depend a lot on taste. Are you more into eurogames (great mechanics, generally light on theme) or "ameritrash" (great theme, generally complex mechanics)? Do you want a heavyweight, longer game, or a lighter-weight, short game? Are you a fan of luck in games, or would you rather it was more skill-based? Do you like diplomacy as a game mechanic?

If you're just looking for a list of games to try, see http://www.boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame and start from the top.

Also, most (good) board game shops have an open play night where you can go in and check out whatever you want. This makes putting $80 down for that copy of Agricola much easier.

If you're in the greater Seattle area, Uncle's Games at Redmond Town Center has a game night on Fridays. They're also the best game shop around, imho (although I might be biased, they know me by name).

I'm from Belgium. :)

I'm pretty open and I guess I can't be disappointed by the top picks.

Yeah, I was lurking at Agricola and Puerto Rico but they seem similar to the Settlers of Catan (I may be mistaken).

If people like card games, I can also recommend the original Canasta. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canasta

I can seriously recommend Agricola. It features a very novel gameplay concept, and to make it even better, they have different sets of cards to adjust the games difficulty level. I've played Agricola about 10 times or so now, but I'm eager to play it more often. And there's not a lot of games that can do that.

PS. Hi from Netherlands ;)

Just ordered it, thx!

Puerto Rico, Power Grid, Race for the Galaxy >> Settlers of Catan, all the way.

Basically, start at the top and go down: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame

In my experience --- and I am from Germany ;) --- The top games at the boardgamegeek are too complex as first games.

Settlers, Bohnanza and Carcassonne are excellent starters into the world of boardgames. Geeks will want to graduate to Caylus, Puerto Rico and the like later on.

Come on. Nothing beats a good 40-hour marathon of Axis & Allies.

40 hours, and all that matters is whoever can hold the Caucasus for longer that 2-3 turns.

Funny a friend just introduced this game to me a couple weeks ago, it is pretty fun and easy to learn buy in my opinion too short, more like a rush to get 10 points than a thorough strategy game. For the first few games, just when I had my little economy humming along somebody would bust out their ten victory points out of nowhere.

The luck and strategy part is also very nicely done in http://www.wesnoth.org/ which is inspired by Settlers of Catan and other such games. You might be repulsed by the graphics at first, but after a while you actually get to appreciate them and find that they fit in perfectly.

Wesnoth is nothing like Settlers, but it's still a good game, especially considering the price. IIRC, ESR wrote a campaign for it.

yup, ESR is an active contributor. You can find him in #wesnoth@irc.freenode.net sometimes.

I used to play this game all the time, but eventually just got tired of it. It became too predictable.

It certainly has become the new Monopoly in Germany. I prefer Carcassonne, though, or at the very least, Settlers with the Cities and Knights expansion.

Also the settlers of catan card game is very good in my opinion (I like it much better than the board game).

I don't really like it, I guess it's a personal preference, but I need a game where skill is just a little bit more important.

When I play Catan I just feel like I'm following a train track - zero options.

I prefer Warcraft, the board game! :)

Truly one of my favorite board games! That, Twilight Imperium, and A Game of Thrones!

Twilight Imperium is really great. A couple of others that I really liked is Android and Arkham Horror (different style though).

Has anyone played Diplomacy and/or Long live the King? I love their concept, although I haven't played any of them..

Slightly off-topic: I play a lot of rpg's, but for some reason I don't like their newer versions, ie d&d v3+, vampire: the requiem etc. Are there any others who have gone through the different versions? How do you feel about the most recent ones?

Yes! The original WarCraft board game is way underrated - mostly because you have to download a patch (yes, for a board game) and because it doesn't come with fancy molded plastic pieces.

It's much more for the hardcore tabletop gamer, though. (As is the StarCraft board game, which is quite different but also wonderful.)

Can someone please make this game into an iphone/ipod touch app already

A lot of the fun of the game is playing with other people, taking and in general hanging out. I get together with a handful of people about once a month to play board games. We try to play one new game every time and then replay the good ones. Puerto Rico, Agricola, Power Grid, Ccitadels, etc. We any of the Boston hackers be interested in joining or starting a startup/hacker board game night?

That said, though, I wonder why there aren't more "hot seat" style mobile games, designed to be played on one handset that gets passed around. Or on many handsets that share game info wirelessly but depend somehow on co-presence in the real world.

I've played "Das verrückte Labyrinth" in this way with a friend on two Nintendo DS.

As others have said, I find Settlers to be all about the initial positioning of your pieces. Choose wrong and it's a slow grind to an inevitable defeat.

If you want (as the article claims) a real Monpoly-how-it-should-be game, give Chinatown a try.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/47

It's about free-style trading much like Monopoly should be, except that it doesn't suck.

I had no idea they were releasing a new PC version soon, that's great news. I'm hoping they introduce a tutorial mode. I've tried introducing friends to PlayCatan.com but having to explain all the rules in chat they lose interest right away.

And Puerto Rico is even better :)

Here is an unofficial online flash version of Settlers of Cataan. (Registration is required) http://games.asobrain.com/

growing up in germany I lost a lot of my youth time to this game

This is a new thing? I've hated this game for years.

It's one of the best board games I've ever played.

And there is a java version called jsettlers with online ladders and so on, that helped a lot to spread word about Settlers. The java version was created to test artificial intelligence applications for robot players, with some success (although robots never beat a trained human).

Settlers as a game pushes the player to discover different business strategies and to commit to them; in between strategies never win. And always to invest! Cards in the hand lose value very fast (and get taken away en masse with a 7, and by the robber as well). It's fascinating.

Edit: some here mentioned the "Cities and Knights extension". I have never played the game without them -- even back in 2001, the board game you can buy on a shop already had Cities and Knights included. I didn't know it existed without them at all.

Edit 2: the JSettlers applet: http://www.jsettlers.com/

We can also play for free on the official website : http://www.cms.playcatan.com/content/view/137/59/lang,en_US/

And there's also another open source version, Pioneers : http://pio.sourceforge.net/

There is a nice Java implementation and community at

http://games.asobrain.com

It's called "Xplorers" for copyright reasons.

Solid game, but not the best of the genre. Tigris and Euphrases FTW.

Tigris is a much deeper game.

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