In Silicon Valley, Settlers is the New Golf | Hacker News Reader

In Silicon Valley, Settlers is the New Golf

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76 pointsandrewpbrett50 comments

Other things that can and have been traded in Settlers of Catan when I play with my friends:

Future production. Your next resource, next specific resource, all resources for next X rolls of the die, resources from a specific tile, or settlement/city.

Future rights. Right to trade at a certain rate in the future. Right to choose robber placement in future.

"Equity" in a settlement. Contribute resources to another player building a settlement in exchange for some fraction of the resources it will produce in the future.

And I'm sure as we keep playing more things will be added to this list.

For a slightly silly but still fun variant. Settlers with Nuclear Weapons! http://albertsun.info/misc/nuclear-settlers.pdf

these are all great - very creative! I suspect a few of them will work their way into any future games I'm a part of.

We trade everything, too. But no agreements are binding.

Do you have credit crunches as well?

In golf there's a lot of downtime built in which gives you time to talk, build a relationship, etc.

If you try to do this over a board game you'll just hold up gameplay. And depending on the game it can be rude to have other conversations while someone is making a move.

Settlers is light enough (and hopefully the group you play with as well) to allow for constant conversation. While you do need to use your mind, it is not close to the level required by Chess/Go/etc.

Settlers is also reliant upon trading and player interaction, which helps to at least get you comfortable with the other players in the game, if not conversing with them.

This really depends on the group in question. Talking about a lot of extraneous stuff in the middle of a game would probably be frowned upon in my particular group. In particular, in Settlers, people are often yelling out general trade offers, "anyone need wool? Wool for wood at 2 for 1! etc..." such that I think any added conversation would be problematic.

Settlers isn't just last year, it's last century (1995). It did however spawn an entire new genre of boardgames with less emphasis on money and conquest, and more on game balance, allowing trailing players to catch up, and creating a variety of different strategies to win (TMTOWTDI).

I'm just back from the Dutch gaming convention, and picked up Powergrid and Pandemic - highly recommended. Other favorites are Race For The Galaxy and Agricola.

Yes, Settlers is an old hat for people who living in or next to Germany. (It's not the new "Monopoly", yet, but comes close for some circles of gamers.)

Caylus is worth a look, too. For a medium-light and fun game, take a look at St. Petersburg. Tongiaki has very elegant game mechanisms (and you can do a nasty things to your fellow players).

If you are only playing with your spouse, Roma and Lost Cities are worth a look. The latter being a very nice gateway drug for non-gamers.

(I could talk all day about games.)

Seriously, I've never gotten much of a chance to play Settlers because most of my friends were bored with it by 2001 or so. And my not-particularly-geeky 60+ year old parents were taught to play it by their friends about five years ago...

Settler's is great, but a lot of people will complain it leaves too much to chance. That's actually partly why it remains fun for beginners, and the law of averages usually works out for the experienced folks in the end anyway.

For those looking for a less random experience, there's Puerto Rico, which is almost entirely deterministic. Agricola showed up on the scene recently and everyone's been raving about it.

>Settler's is great, but a lot of people will complain it leaves too much to chance.

I've noticed this quite a bit in the board game community, which I think is unfortunate. Chess is a great game, but Poker is too.

The element of chance not only makes the game more entertaining against a better player, but also disguises the winning strategies so that the game requires deeper thinking to master.

Poker isn’t really a game of chance, in even remotely the same way that Settlers is.

Settlers doesn’t really require much deep thinking to master, or allow particularly hidden strategies.

On the contrary, both games have hidden information and an unknowable optimal strategy. Poker is more challenging because more is hidden, but there are similar underpinnings.

Okay, but that’s true for any game that isn’t completely deterministic, for instance, Yahtzee or Guess Who. Poker and settlers are worlds apart in any reasonable comparison though: one is a light-hearted family game in which any player has a reasonable chance of success, and the rules are set up to keep games relatively close feeling, and the other is a ruthless betting game, in which superior players quickly and consistently trounce less experienced opponents (and take all their money), with chance generally only entering substantially in games between players of similar skill.

For more games like the above, see games ranked according to BGG:

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

The Board Game Geeks generally prefer heavier games. That skews the rating somewhat, if you are looking for lighter stuff.

I find generally that the people who most berate the game for it's dependency on chance are the ones who are losing :)

Of course, if you're winning, it's all skill!

Golf always seemed to me as a way to do networking. If you go alone you are usually grouped with 3 others for foursome groups which gives you a chance to meet other people. If you go to the right courses you stand a good chance of making useful connections that you may not have been able to get otherwise. Settlers seems like a great board game but I don't see it as a networking tool the way golf or other competition card games can be like poker. Unless we start hearing that business deals are formed over a game of Settlers I don't see it as taking the place in business that golf currently holds.

I was at a geek gathering once where another person observed that the startup people were all playing poker (bluffing, gambling), and employees of the big companies were playing Settlers (resource management, slow and steady gains).

Anyway, "X is the new Y" articles are always garbage.

Whatever happened to Hearts? During the dot-com boom, developers would gather and play Hearts at lunch. When I was interviewing back then, over and over again I'd get asked, "oh, and do you play hearts?" Ended up working for a company where we played everyday.

I love this game, in 2 player games with my wife, I think it's about 18-2 to her, I'm not so good at the strategy!

The only bad thing is when in a 4 player game, depending on your placement of settlements and what happens right at the start of the game with road building, you can immediately find youself in for a very hard long slog and be stuck on 3-4 points knowing that you have no realistic chance of winning and are just waiting for one of the other players to get 10 points.

3 players is the optimum I find.

One nice thing about a game of Settlers is that even if you get locked out early, you'll only be losing for 45 minutes at most. The game is downright quick to play. Around here we go from opening the box to packing it up in about 30 minutes usually.

Also, just because you have no chance of winning, doesn't mean you can't have a very large impact on the outcome of the game ...

Here's a hint, don't sink your wife - even if she totally deserved it. :)

tom - she sinks me!

That game is like Euchre. It seems like it has a lot of strategy, but then you get into it and learn that optimum play is fairly simple. With a group of experienced players it's mainly just die rolling.

I greatly prefer Dominion.

Wait... I thought that cycling was the new golf in Silicon Valley. Something about how it's easier for good cyclists to accommodate not-so-good cyclists than it is for good golfers to not completely upstage bad golfers.

Cycling is great for doing business. Pretty much everybody around there has a bike. The roads and trails around there are amazing. It's easy enough to carry on a conversation if you take a relaxed pace. Also, the weekend warriors get to show off their $3000 carbon-fiber rides that have only 150 miles on them. (Sort of like gearheads in golf, in a way.)

The whole point is to talk during the activity. Holding a conversation while biking would be difficult. Between more than 2 people it would be all but impossible.

Well, then use a conference bike http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conference_Bike

Another fantastic social/trading game is the card game Bohnanza. I prefer it to Catan because Catan feels too chance-driven:

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

The briefest explanation is you have a randomly drawn hand that you can see but not rearrange, so you try to enact trades/changes that support your future cards.

I like Bohnanza, too. You can do some pretty fancy three or four-way trades, if you play the game mechanics right.

(If only we hadn't played it as often as we did, it would still hit the table.)

Settlers is so last year. Dominion is the new Settlers.

Settlers is last /decade/. Dominion is just last year.

Dominion is Magic The Gathering light. (I still enjoy it and bought a copy.)

That's kinda the point though. It can take a few days to a few weeks to put together a good M:tG deck, and then games run from minutes to an hour. It takes a few hours to play Settlers. With Dominion, you put together the deck as you play, and if people are reasonably familiar with the cards, a game lasts 20-30 minutes. That's quite a fast pace for what's still a fairly interesting strategy game.

You should try the format of Magic, where everyone gets a basic deck and two booster decks a few minutes before the game and gets to build a deck with it. (You can `synthesize' booster decks, too.)

For me, Dominion could use some more interaction.

If it is available in the US: try the Settlers of Catan card game. It is actually much better than the board game, but it is for 2 players only.

Personally I prefer Carcassonne to Catan.

The Catan Dice game is actually also pretty funny. A clever variation of another famous game principle that does not require too much thinking. I like how they milk the trademark but still come up with quality ideas.

My wife and I love Carcassonne! One of it's big points is that we can play with only 2 players. Plus the infinite possible arrangements of the board means no two games are ever alike. :-)

The worst feeling in the world is when someone finagles a second hunter or hut onto an area/river you previously controlled. 'Course, that's one of my strategies...

I also like the 2 player game. And it is somehow aesthetically pleasing to the brain when the complex shapes snap together :-)

My mistake was to play online a lot, so I can't play with my friends anymore because I have too much practice.

Just play with a handicap of one meeple less (or something like that).

I bought the Card Game before I bought the board game. That was back in 1997 when I was a cash-strapped pre-teenager. The card game went for 20 Deutsche Mark and the board game was 40 Deutsche Mark.

All in all I prefer the board game, since there's no use in trading in the card game, when you think about it. There's no use in cooperating in a two-player game, unless you have objectives other than winning.

Roma (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/16496) is my preferred German-style two-player game at the moment. Though Lost Cities is also nice.

Will check those games. Of course if the trading part is your favorite aspect of Catan, the card game is not for you.

I think before Catan I already new that trading element from the Civilization board game (which is great, too - but rather geeky).

For Roma, there's an interesting session report (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/443836). (Though rather geeky.)

Man, Settlers. I remember playing until 4 a.m. during a trip to Vegas once (don't ask). Kept on losing because of my reputation, of all things - after two wins, everybody got paranoid about making deals with me.

I love that game!! It's a perfect amount of strategy, but not so much that it is not a relaxing diversion.

Another fun game in the same genre is Stone Age.

Be sure to get a set with wooden figures (like the old German version). The plastic stuff is just not nice too look at and handle.

Well that's too bad, b/c I can actually beat my wife at golf. Seafarers of Catan? Not so much.

Wasn't WoW supposed to be the new golf amongst the Silicon Valley lot?

anyone wanna play settlers in palo alto?

i'd rather play golf than a board game.

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