The Settlers of Catan

In this entry I’m going to be talking about one of the more renowned titles. Created in Germany back in 1995, The Settlers of Catan is a multi-player game (3-4 players) where the players assume settlers of a new island called Catan. The objective of the game is to harvest resources, build roads and settlements and trade resources with other players. I wish I could describe it as a middle age Monopoly but Monopoly isn't nearly as fun, but you could say they have a few similarities.

I chose to do The Settlers of Catan as my first entry because of the way it draws you in. It’s like the gateway drug of board games, once you try it, you got to have more Catan and more board games like Catan. Not only did it get me addicted to board games, but even my girlfriend likes it (considering she’s not a dork like me, that’s pretty impressive).

This is what the board game looks like

This is what makes up the board

If you haven’t figured it out yet, you essentially put the board together piece by piece when you set it up. The individual hexes have different terrain to farm different resources from:

Forest produces wood

Hills produce clay/brick

Mountains produce ore

Fields produce wheat

Pastures produce sheep (wool)

And one desert hex that doesn't produce anything

There is one way to assemble it for beginners. Other than that there’s no reason not to randomly put the pieces anyway you want for a more interesting game.

The turn starts with the player rolling the dice. If you or any other player has a city/settlement adjacent to a hex with the number on the dice, you produce that resource and store it to either build and advance yourself in the game or keep it for later and trade with another player if you didn’t generate the specific resource you wanted.

The action phase of your turn comes next and you can either trade or build at this time. Building requires you to spend resources to build roads, new settlements or cities, or purchase a development card (I’ll get into those later). You build roads to build new settlements at sites that yield resources you believe are needed for you to win the game. You build settlements to generate more resources to build more or build expensive things, and you build cities over your settlements to further improve the amount of resources you generate.  Consider the building placement of your entire colony because good placement gives you a slight advantage in the game.

Trading is more interesting compared to Monopoly. In Catan, you are given a choice to either trade with a player or with the bank. Since it takes 4 resources of the same kind to trade for only 1 resource of any kind, the game encourages you trade with other players instead. When trading with other players simply declare what resources you want and what you’re willing to trade it for. You can even monopolize individual resources if your colony is situated in a way that you’re the only player generating that specific resource, letting you charge extra when the other players come begging for it.

There are few things left that you need to know, otherwise I might as well turn this blog into a rule book. There are some mechanics like the robber which steals from other players and the development cards that I won’t go into detail. Development cards are usually bought when players have no more space to expand or if they want to take a gamble and receive a random benefit. The robber is pretty self-explanatory, he goes around the board and steals resources, nobody likes him.

This is the robber, he's not cool.

When you play settlers of Catan, you’re always gathering resources, building structures to expand your colony and trading with players to reach 10 victory points. You get victory points by building settlements, cities, the longest road or the largest army.

1 for a settlement or victory point development card

2 for a city, longest road, or largest army.

One game lasts from about 45 minutes to an hour on average. Once you start playing you might not have any good idea of how you would go about winning the game. After a few games you’ll notice what really worked for you and build your colony strategically, gaining advantages you have over your opponents. You can follow any strategy you want but the game will usually depend on the luck of the dice.

It might not sound as fun but it’s really great when you get a chance to play it. If you do, there’s also many expansions and variations for the game to twist things up a bit if things have gone stale after a couple of games.  

That basically sums up The Settlers of Catan for you. I’ll write about a new game every week and try to play with some friends to give you guys a more in-depth look into each one.

Thanks for reading J