I had never played Catan, but I had heard a lot about it and the first homework for the Games 101 elective class was the perfect reason to stop procrastinating to play that game and actually do it. The Settlers of Catan is a german board game first published in 1995, which was inspired by how it was for vikings to settle in Iceland. The game is fairly easy to understand, even though it seemed daunting at first when I opened the box and saw lots of little pieces and a decent number of big pieces. I’ll explain the game point by point on what makes a game a game.
Player Input: The way you interact with this game is done by throwing a couple of dice, putting pieces which can be settles, cities or roads on the board, and finally collecting cards which can be traded in order to progress in the game.
Challenge: The challenge here is trying to build the most cities or settles and get first the number of “victory points” by collecting and trading resources. You can also use resources to get development cards, which will further help you to get closer to that magic number of victory points.
Medium: The game is played on a board, which represents the island of Catan. It is composed of hexagonal tiles of different land types. Since it was my first time I set these tiles on the “First Play” order the manual told me, but they are put randomly in the actual game. Above these tiles there are little cardboard circles with a number. These numbers will rule if the land produced resources if after throwing the dice they sum the number the hexagon has above.
Goal: The goal of the game is to get first to the magic number of “Victory Points”, which are rewarded by building settles, cities or getting development cards.
Rules:
-In order to build settles and cities, you must have the necessary resources, as well as having a route to the place you want to build.
-You may only build a settlement on an open intersection.
-If you roll a “7,” no one receives any resources. Instead, every player who has more than 7 Resource Cards must select half (rounded down) of his Resource Cards and return them to the bank.Then you must move the robber. You must move the robber immediately to the number token of any other terrain hex or to the desert hex. Then you steal 1 (random) Resource Card from an opponent who has a settlement or city adjacent to the target terrain hex. The player who is robbed holds his Resource Card hand face down. You then take 1 at random. If the target hex is adjacent to 2 or more players’ settlements or cities, you choose which one you want to rob.
-Each player who has a settlement on an intersection that borders a terrain hex marked with the number rolled receives 1 Resource Card of the hex’s type.
-During your turn, you can always trade at 4:1 by putting identical Resource Cards back in their stack and taking any 1 Resource Card of your choice for it. Or trade with other players.
-At any time during your turn, you may play 1 Development Card (on the table). That card, however, may not be a card you bought during the same turn.
-If you have 10 or more victory points during your turn the game ends and you are the winner.
Fun: This is the sum of all the other things. The rules, the challenge, the goal the medium and the player input put you on a situation in which you have to defeat a number of players (depends on version of the game) and this is something inherent to the human being. The challenge and feel of competition is the most basic reason you have fun. Then the design of this game makes sure is an interesting competition, one in which anything can happen and not only depends on luck but also strategy. Personally, I liked the pace of the game and it made me feel satisfied because you don’t exactly lose at the end of the game since you’ve accomplished a lot building, as well as having a tight final score. The people I played with had never played Catan too, so the experience wasn’t that seamless because we had to fact check some of the rules. But at the end of the game I believe this is a very fun game I’m excited to play again. And yes, I lost that first game to my friend Ruby.
