Anyone up for a game of Settlers of Catan?
We don’t do much gaming, here in the Martin household. There are multiple reasons for that.
Games for experts. I like Checkers and am pretty good at it. Christine likes Scrabble and is pretty good at it. I’m not good at Scrabble and Christine isn’t good at Checkers. So, we don’t enjoy playing each other’s games very much. We’re both interested in learning Go, but it’s a game that can take a lifetime to master. That might be fun in 5 years, but what about when we just want some quick fun for a date night?
Too many kids games. I’m just not that into Uno, Sorry, or Candyland. They don’t have much (any) opportunity for strategy or true competition. They’re too simple and basic for me to get into them when we play.
The games take too long. Monopoly and Risk: I’m looking at you. A game that takes 3-5 hours to play is a non-starter in a household with young children involved. There’s just never that much time free, to play.
So what should we play? Wired says that we should be looking at the growing list of German board games.
Wired describes the options like this.
There are so-called lifestyle games, like Scrabble and chess, intellectual skill-based games whose devotees are interested in playing little else; party games like Trivial Pursuit and Jenga; and traditional strategy games like Risk and Monopoly, which are generally seen as child’s play or possibly something to do while trapped in a snowstorm without power—just before you eat your own foot.
… Monopoly also fails with many adults because it requires almost no strategy. The only meaningful question in the game is: To buy or not to buy? Most of its interminable three- to four-hour average playing time (length being another maddening trait) is spent waiting for other players to roll the dice, move their pieces, build hotels, and collect rent. Board game enthusiasts disparagingly call this a “roll your dice, move your mice” format.
German-style games, on the other hand, avoid direct conflict. Violence in particular is taboo in Germany’s gaming culture, a holdover from decades of post-World War II soul-searching. In fact, when Parker Brothers tried to introduce Risk there in 1982, the government threatened to ban it on the grounds that it might encourage imperialist and militaristic impulses in the nation’s youth. (The German rules for Risk were hastily rewritten so players could “liberate” their opponents’ territories, and censors let it slide.)
Instead of direct conflict, German-style games tend to let players win without having to undercut or destroy their friends. This keeps the game fun, even for those who eventually fall behind. Designed with busy parents in mind, German games also tend to be fast, requiring anywhere from 15 minutes to a little more than an hour to complete. They are balanced, preventing one person from running away with the game while the others painfully play out their eventual defeat. And the best ones stay fresh and interesting game after game.
Wired recommends — in fact, it’s the reason for the article — the German game Settlers of Catan.
Instead of a traditional fold-out board, for example, Settlers has the 19 hexagonal tiles, each representing one of five natural resources—wooded forests, sheep-filled meadows, mountains ripe for quarrying. At the beginning of every game, they’re arranged at random into an island. Next, numbered tokens marked from 2 to 12 are placed on each tile to indicate which dice rolls will yield a given resource. Because the tiles get reshuffled after every game, you get a new board every time you play.
The idea is that players establish settlements in various locations on the board, and those settlements collect resource cards whenever the token number for the tile they are sitting on gets rolled. By redeeming these resource cards in specific combinations (it takes a hand of wood, brick, wheat, and wool to build a new settlement, for instance), you expand your domain. Every settlement is worth a point, cities are two points, and the first player to earn 10 points wins. You can’t get ahead by rustling your opponents’ sheep or torching their cute wooden houses.
One of the driving factors in Settlers—and one of the secrets to its success—is that nobody has reliable access to all five resources. This means players must swap cards to get what they need, creating a lively and dynamic market, which works like any other: If ore isn’t rolled for several turns, it becomes more valuable. “Even in this tiny, tiny microcosm of life, scarcity leads to higher prices, and plenty leads to lower prices,” says George Mason University economist Russ Roberts, who uses Settlers to teach his four children how free markets work.
Wheeling and dealing turns out to be an elegant solution to one of the big problems plaguing Monopoly—sitting idle while other players take their turns. Since every roll of the dice in Settlers has the potential to reap a new harvest of resource cards, unleash a flurry of negotiations, and change the balance of the board, every turn engages all the players. “The secret of Catan is that you have to bargain and sometimes whine,” Teuber says.
It sounds like fun to me. Settlers is a game for 3-4 players. The girls are too young for it right now, so we’d only be able to play when friends or family are visiting. We should have family visiting for both Thanksgiving and Christmas, which would be a great opportunity to play.
If we buy it, would any of our Madison friends be up for some games in the new year and beyond?
It’ll be a while before our little crew is ready to join us at the gaming table. That’s why I’m also looking for recommendations for some good 2 person games that Christine and I can play together.