The Man Who Built Catan
newyorker.com
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About 15 years ago, a friend came to visit in my country with Catan. The simple, original box. He stayed at my place and for days my friend, my roommate and his girlfriend and me kept playing it. Then my friend left back to its country and took his Catan with him. We were so addicted and wanted to play really badly, but it was saturday evening.
Shops wouldn't open until monday and we wanted to play. We had played the game so much in a few days, non-stop, that we knew it by heart.
So I told my roomate and his girlfriend: let's build it. I was working in the book publishing business and had a very nice color printer at my apartment. I fired up Gimp on Linux (IIRC) and Quark XPress (that I'm sure of) on the old Mac and started designing basic hexagons and cards layout while my roommate started drawing and his girlfriend started writing down everything she remembered. Then we printed everything on the color laser printer and started cutting.
In about three hours (!!!) we had a functional game (we'd put a huge table glass on the map once randomly distributed). And we played the whole Saturday night, the whole Sunday... And when we woke up on Monday, we went to buy the game.
We were so into it that the three of us couldn't wait 36 hours or so to buy the game: we had to have it immediately. And we built it.
There's one word I'm thinking of for this game: addictive ^ ^
I've since "graduated" on to more complicated games, so I rarely play it anymore, but I find that it's an effective "gateway" German-style board game. Almost all of my friends who have played it love it, and have gone on to try (and enjoy) other German-style games. Catan is nice because it's sufficiently more complex (and well-designed) than Monopoly so as to be interesting, but not so complex that the rules take ages for newcomers to learn (as is often the case with many more complicated games).
My personal favorite at the moment is Through the Ages[1], though I'm also a fan of Puerto Rico[2], as it's a rare example of a good game that has (almost) no random elements to its gameplay, such as rolling dice or shuffling a deck. (There is one set of tiles that is shuffled, but it's rather inconsequential and could easily be made deterministic if desired).
Here in NYC, there's a cafe dedicated to board games and which was funded on Kickstarter[3]. As a huge board game geek, I'm really glad they're catching on.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-style_board_game
[1] http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/25613/through-the-ages-a-...
After playing a fair bit of Catan, I tend to get frustrated with how it's just a bit too random to establish complex strategy. I rather like Dominion for variability and depth.
But it's missing one key thing that Puerto Rico has -- the depth of subtle interaction. Yes, there's some interaction cards in Dominion, but with PR there's this level of play that goes beyond blocking other players and into providing incentives for them to do things with a timing that's advantageous for you (and slightly less advantageous for them, but not so much that they can resist :).
Not a whole lot of games like that.
I don't understand at all why monopoly is the universal board game that every kid learns. It's a horrible game that drags on for hours. Even though I don't particular care for Catan it'd make a much better universal board game.
A vanilla game of 4 player monopoly should take no more than an hour.
Now, that doesn't justify turning the game into a 4 hour slog, but it may help to explain why so many people use these "wimp rules".
It didn't, it was a bandage to cover the fact that Monopoly is not a very good kids game.
Also, fwiw, 99% of casual players I've seen overvalue the marquee properties like Boardwalk, etc., and undervalue the oranges, light blues, and reds.
This is the key one.
Monopoly changed it up by making it possible to become the evil landlord, and that's what made it successful.
Catan at least has the advantage of monotonically increasing building and army points: Given enough time and even barely rational spending, a player is guaranteed to reach 10 points, no matter how alliances form and splinter.
The biggest problem we encountered in both games was the "spoiler": The player who was not in a position to win, but was in a position to determine the winner. Either you try to impose hard-to-adjudicate rules requiring "rational decisions" or you accept that a long-running game may be decided by caprice.
Obviously it only works if you play with the same people regularly, but in my experience that's actually the norm.
I'm guessing you weren't actually following the rules[1]. If you do follow the rules you'll find liquidity gets sucked out of the game by continual reselling because you are only allowed to sell unimproved properties, and have to sell houses & hotels back to the bank at half price.
[1] http://richard_wilding.tripod.com/monorules.htm#sellingprope...
Once a few monopolies did crop up, it was the remaining unimproved properties that would be swapped most often for ludicrous amounts of money to allow, say, a cash-poor player to build a few houses in the path of the current leader.
I guess you are not a fan of Diplomacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(game)), either.
Most, if not all, games of more than two players where players have some free choice eventually boil down to "you can't win it alone. You need help or a blooper from your enemy"
And that is true in sports, too. In any distance running, starting at 800m, athletes collectively make a choice whether to run a fast race or a slow race with a very fast finish. A fast sprinter will not win a fast race, so runners with lower top speed will try to make a fast race. Still, they won't want to be running in the front, they rather have another runner with lower top speed burn energy doing that.
This gets more evident the longer the distance and the larger the advantage of running in the slipstream of an opponent. Road races in cycling are perhaps the ultimate example. If "the peloton" doesn't want you to win, you have to be extremely good _and_ lucky to win.
That rule is so rarely followed I end up in an argument with other players every time I play a game of Monopoly for attempting to play by the rules. People don't even believe that the rule exists, never mind make a conscious decision not to follow it.
The fact games of Monopoly always open with an argument is probably a big factor in me no longer playing Monopoly.
Catan's manual is short because it's excessively terse. I've never seen anybody successfully learn Catan from the instruction manual.
Also, while Monopoly has some absurd tacked-on rules, Catan has some strange edge-cases that confuse the game - like the trick where you can break an opponent's longest-road if you can plonk a settlement somewhere along it.
E.g. if [x] is your settlement, [o] is an opponent's and = is a road:
[x]==[0]= <-- you can build another road here [x]==[0] <-- you can't build another road
Well, inasmuch as it does that, it's teaching the correct economic lesson: when you allow for monopolies, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and social mobility (what a game designer would term "avoiding lame-duck scenarios") is nowhere to be found.
I'd say Monopoly is actually great to play with kids... once. Right after they develop naive libertarianism as an ideology. ;)
The dice roll of course represents that life is unpredictable. But I struggle to find the real world analogy where I go bankrupt because I randomly end up in a hotel in Park Avenue.
What strange shenanigans is going on that compels me to move so much? Especially moving into hotels when I previously lived in a house.
For that matter, if a property doesn't have a house nor hotel what am I paying rent for? The street?
Also, why can't I build a house on my property unless I own the two or three properties in the same area?
I also fail to see how one is supposed to learn anything about economics from the game other than just the basics that takes five minutes to explain.
Picture each set of colored properties as a separate country. You are an entrepreneur, so when you land in a country, you implicitly try to start a business there. The "base rent" for that country is the cost of doing business--corporate tax rate et al.
Each square within a country is an industry. As you build "houses" and then "hotels", you take over that industry. (Houses and hotels themselves make sense as markers if the industry you're taking over is real-estate; otherwise, interpret them as the symbolic equivalents for their own industry. For a manufacturing industry, this would be exclusivity deals with parts of the supply chain. Etc.)
When you've got a full set of houses on a square, you have a monopoly in that industry. This isn't as useful, though, as having bargaining/lobbying power from multiple industries that operate in the same country--having houses on all the squares. When you do that, you can convince the government to give you their contracts--to enforce the mega-monopolies for you, like in telecommunications or defense. These claims are represented by the hotels.
When you land on a square, and someone else has a monopoly there already? Your implicit entrepreneurial bid will be quite a bit more costly. But, of course, your customers expect you to expand into new territories, even if someone else controls them, so expand you must.
(I'm not sure what the railroads and such then represent, though. There aren't that many global utilities that actually give people power when they control them; the shipping-container era kind of fixed that. The internet backbone might seem to be a contender, but it doesn't really make that much money for the people who control it.)
Whats more complicated, Chess, or Go?
Its not the only categorization rule, of course. I think "Chutes 'n Ladders" would technically qualify as a eurogame solely under the "simple rules" rule, but it fails as having no social interaction, no strategy element, extreme influence of randomness, being designed and marketed extremely strongly toward the 5 yr old mind, etc.
That's what I introduced to my daughter concerning Monopoly and she loved it. Helped her with the concept of basic math as well.
This doesn't necessarily mean Monopoly is more complex. It just means they used lots of words to describe what is ultimately a fairly simple game.
Catan is nice, but it does suffer from the same problem, the dice rolls influence way too much of the game.
My personal favorites for long games are: The Game of Thrones board game, which is really awesome with the right set of players because it favors a lot diplomacy and strategy (the biggest problem with it is the randomness of the cards, but you can patch the rules to correct that); Eclipse, a 4X strategy game, quite balanced and with interesting rules (the bigger your empire is, the more costly your actions are); Civilization the board game, which is also extremely well balanced (all games I've played have seen cultural, financial, military and technological victories being competitive); and finally, for some good fun with friends, Battlestar Galactica (w/ expansions), which is a classical cooperative board game with traitors (except for a few twists). The tense atmosphere of the TV show is well re-transcribed in the game.
For short to averagely long games, my favorites are Agrikola, Race for The Galaxy with the first two expansions (I've probably played hundreds of games of this one at this point), Olympos, Caylus, Power Grid (with slight patches to the rules), Smallworld...
If you like games with no chance at all, try Intrigue. It is a game of pure negociation and backstabbing, and you may end up angry with your friends after playing it :-) (which is why it gets very polarized reviews on BGG and equivalents; much like the GoT board game, it is a game where you have to make alliances and betray them in order to win).
I like German games a lot but I'm not a fan of the "if it has dice or cards, it's not worth playing" mentality that I sometimes see. Games have a variety of social purposes. Sometimes I want to play something like Cards Against Humanity and sometimes I want to play Tigris and Euphrates. Ain't nothing wrong with that. (I do get annoyed with the people who only want to play Texas Hold 'em, though.)
[0]: I don't mean to imply that these games are without depth. It's just that the rules are simple, and the complexity comes more from the players.
I'm not sure what a "German aesthetic" would be in a card game, but one Austrian trick-taking card game that is a lot of fun is Schnapsen. The cards are random, the trump is random, and you draw cards each turn adding temporal randomness, but outwitting the randomness (and your opponent) is part of the appeal. It's slightly complex (a bit more than Hearts), but still way simpler than Bridge. Each round is fairly fast (5-10 minutes), and you can play a match (to 7 points) under an hour.
Apparently, it's called Sixty-Six (Sechsundsechzig) in Germany, though Schnapsen is a variant.
http://www.pagat.com/marriage/schnaps.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixty-six_%28card_game%29
Well it depends, when there are dealt hands, we usually do some kind of drafting with my group (even when it's specifically written in the rules) because it helps dealing with the randomness factor a lot, while still providing the added re-playability that cards add in a game (and other random factors, like dices - for example in Myrmes, where they determine events that are common to all the players).
Agrikola for example features a LOT of cards which add an incredible depth to the game, and drafting allows you to carefully prepare your combos and make sure that you don't get too many or too few good cards. There's randomness in the way the Agrikola board is setup as well, so overall there's a lot of replay value with that game. For me it's one of the greatest example of modern German-style games.
(I mentioned Race for the Galaxy earlier, and it's a card game only, but there's a ton of strategy within it, and drafting + using the provided starting worlds helps mitigating the randomness out of it. (A few patch to the rules can be used as well for experienced players). Sometimes you'll be a bit lucky or unlucky, but the upside is that with experienced players, games are short and luck averages out quickly.)
> I like German games a lot but I'm not a fan of the "if it has dice or cards, it's not worth playing" mentality that I sometimes see. Games have a variety of social purposes. Sometimes I want to play something like Cards Against Humanity and sometimes I want to play Tigris and Euphrates. Ain't nothing wrong with that. (I do get annoyed with the people who only want to play Texas Hold 'em, though.)
I completely agree.
Usually, the algorithms do stuff like:
- if there's a 6 and 8 next to each other, the third field is always a 2 or 12
- there's always wood next to clay
- a 2:1 harbor is never next to a huge field of one type of resource (say, 2-3 grassland)
- etc.At least in the version of the game that I own, if you follow the prescribed setup rules, there can never be an adjacent 6 and 8. The terrain tiles are randomized, but the placement of the numbers on the tiles is deterministic, and results in a spatially uniform distribution of the high-yield numbers.
Not quite; the random placement of the desert tiles affects it, and you choose at random where to begin placing. That said, its still impossible for there to be adjacent 6s/8s.
It's like chess or go in that you need to keep careful tabs on your opponent, but can be played with 3-5 players.
The Settlers video game is a more complex and is more like Age of Empires (a few years later) but with a focus on low level business and building up of an economy. You need a forester, lumberjack and a sawmill to get planks. You need a well, a corn farm, a corn mill and a baker to get bread. But the basic goal is to expand your territory like years later in Catan. Anno [2] video game series is very similar to The Settlers with a focus on trading ships and islands.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Settlers_of_Catan
Couldn't they have traded some grain or ore?
Eurogames trace their ancestry from early American designers, and Europeans have contributed some really garish ameritrash (esp. the British.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3WJTlDa7oo
This is a Table Top episode hosted by Wil Wheaton playing Settlers of Catan. There is also another episode where they play the Star Trek variation.
Also, if you haven't seen this series and are interested in board games I highly suggest you watch other episodes. The level of interest will vary from episode to episode based on whether you like the type of game they play. But they give you a decent idea of how the game works and how it is played.
I have made several board game purchases based on this show.
They're also organizing the upcoming International TableTop Day at http://www.tabletopday.com/, and are very proud of how they almost got the ISS involved in last year's but that fell through at the last minute.
Also, anyone play "Escape from Colditz"? man I loved that game as a kid.
If you want simpler but equally fun game for younger kids you should look into "Ticket to Ride". My 7 years old daughter demands me to play this game each day.
I also love the social aspects of trading and the robber. We have a LOT of table talk when we play, and it's hilarious to see what people will say to convince someone to put the robber on a spot they don't own. Also the desperate trades we get into "I'll give 5 wool for a grain! 6 wool for a grain!". It's really the best board game I have ever played by far.
Catan's alright, but it's too random to be really enjoyable. The strategy seems outweighed by getting lucky on rolls or draws.
Note that in order to comply with the rules, every trade must have at least one card exchanged on either side of the transaction.
It took us a while to work up to cities and knights, but I really have trouble playing the vanilla game anymore.
A lot of people never think to do things like: - Pay the robber to rob someone else - Ask the robber what card he wants to take from you, and if it's something you're willing to give up just show him which card it is in your hand - Trade away all of a scarce resource you have, then use the monopoly card to get them back, then trade them away again - Paying someone to build roads to cut someone else off - Paying to "rent" someone's port for a turn to get a better exchange rate
We like to use a house rule that requires all trades to "clear" within a turn (ie no arguments over enforceable/conflicting trades taking place on future turns).
I also assume by paying you mean making an undesirable trade, unless you allow gifting through another house rule.
In some games I've seen the following: Player A (current turn) wants to trade wheat for a brick through Player B's port. Player A will trade 2 wheat and a bonus resource to Player B for x arbitrary resource. On Player B's turn they move the wheat through their harbour for a brick and trade this back to Player A for their x arbitrary resource back. Player B keeps the bonus resource as payment, and Player A gets usage of Player B's harbour. This couldn't happen in one turn as only the current player can use their harbour.
It's not strictly a discrete trade, as there are two steps for the player to take, but it does resolve within a turn (provided the active player has the port).
> Trade away all of a scarce resource you have, then use the monopoly card to get them back, then trade them away again
Yeah that's one of the moves where I just refuse to trade and say "I don't negotiate with terrorists."
I'd believe it of the old Silicon Valley. The new one, with Snapchat and Clinkle and spider pooping and expensive real estate and multiple liquidation preferences? Probably not. I think golf is the new golf in Silicon Valley.
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/ is the IMDB of boardgames.
It seems that most adults end up, just because society is so demanding and competitive these days, with a lot of low-level social anxiety. It's rarely enough that most people notice it, but it keeps people from really relating to each other or learning from each other, and it's a major part of why people become so damn boring, one-sided, and narrowly careerist once they leave school.
There seem to be two antidotes to this low-grade but ubiquitous social anxiety. One is games, the other is alcohol. I don't mind an occasional drink but, most of the time, I prefer the one that sharpens the brain over the one that dulls it.