The Settlers of Catan

I was amazed I had never heard of this game until now. A friend of ours recommended it while visiting, so we ran out and purchased the game right away. That night we played until 1 AM in the morning. This game is fun!

The instruction book is rather large, but the gist of the game is on the first two pages. My 8-year old daughter picked up the game right away and now wants to play all the time. I really like the fact that the game play is different every time. It is definitely a strategy style game and take a few games under your belt to start developing your own strategies.

Our edition came with extra plastic bags for all the pieces. And everything fits nicely into the box. The game board, at first, fit very tight into the surrounding edges. I found that if I took some of the hex pieces and just rubbed the edges on the table to flatten out the nubs created when punching them out of the cardboard that it fit nicely into the surrounding pieces. You might want to do that too.

If you like playing games, this is a must. This is our new 'family game night' game to play. For two players, the game play lasts 30 minutes to an hour. You can figure that for every extra person play, it will add about 30 minutes or so to the game play.

You can't go wrong buying this game!

This is the best board game ever made. There needs to be nothing else written about Settlers of Catan. In fact, everything else I'm writing beyond that first sentence is extraneous. If you're still reading this and not purchasing said board game, you are wasting your time.

Settlers of Catan is by far my favorite board game. We encountered it a few years back and it continues to remain the favorite. The standard version is for 4 people, with the minimum age around 10. Extensions are available, and you can easily change some rules if there are only 3 of you. A typical game lasts about an hour.

The players compete to acquire resources and construct roads, settlements, cities etc. There is also an amount of chance since you use two dice at each turn to determine who gets what resources. In that respect it is like many other board games. But there are three main factors that make it very interesting and why everyone feels that they can have a chance of winning each game: (1) the board setup is random, so that everytime you play, it IS a new game (there is a Nexus One app available that allows you to get a more balanced board), and (2) you can trade resources, and only the player whose turn it is can trade so that each time you have a possibility of acquiring points, and (3) there are many ways of acquiring points to take you to victory.

Incidently, Amir Khan once said on his blog that he likes to play Settlers of Catan a lot.

Due to the large number of possibilities the first time you play it seems a bit daunting. But it is worth every bit of you time and effort. The game was apparently invented in Germany to teach about capitalism. It has one the 'Spiel des Jahres' (game of the year) award in 1995.

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Settlers is a great strategy game geared for a wide audience. The pieces and board were made to be durable and every match is always different due to the different land tiles and different number placings. I'd say the game is a mix between Risk and Monopoly.

We play this game a lot and love it! Once you catch on to the rules it goes quickly and is lots of fun.