I played both games at Game Club on Friday night.
SETTLERS OF CATAN
The game was created by Klaus Teuber. It is a multiplayer board game using pieces and cards. Players take on the roles of settlers settling on the new island of Catan; the goal is to establish as many settlements as possible while trading and collecting resources, which can be used to build settlements and roads to connect settlements. The player who reaches 10 settlements first wins.
It took a while to understand where we were allowed to place our pieces and to get the hang of trading resources. I did not find it fun, although it may have been fun if I played with friends instead of strangers. Also, every player was a first-time player, and it might have been more fun if we had all played the game a few times beforehand. It felt like we put more energy into learning how to play than actually playing. Settlers of Catan is well-designed, though, and I thought the setup of the board was interesting and helpful, as were the cards and instructions. It would be interesting if there was a cap on how many of each type of resource a player is allowed to hold at once.
DOMINION
Created by Donald Vaccarino, Dominion is a deck-building card game where players try to build their own decks so that they have the greatest amount of Victory Points. Card types include Victory cards, which have a Victory Point value; Curse Cards, which have a negative Victory Point value; Treasure Cards, which can be used to buy other cards; and Action Cards, which allow users to do stuff like buying or getting rid of cards, affecting other players, drawing more cards, etc. The card types are organized into stacks. When one stack is used up, the game ends, and the player with the most Victory Points wins.
I am very bad at card games. I thought I would do a little better than I did in Settlers because I watched a game before trying it, but I didn’t. I tried to follow the rules, ended up panicking, and just tried to survive after about 10 minutes. It was more stressful than fun. That has more to do with my taste than the design of the game, though.
Dominion’s cards reminded me of YuGiOh cards, a little bit, and differs from other card games in that the goal is to gain rather than to attack others until they die. It feels almost like a medieval board game in card format, which is pretty cool. The sheer amount of cards is remarkable. There were so many cards. It would be interesting if there was a 10-second window in which players take their turns – this would make the game faster.
