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The Man Who Built Catan

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Re: The Man Who Built Catan

#101

Post by thedufer »

philwelch wrote: post #32
mdmarra wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monopoly only drags on for hours if you play by silly house rules like $400 for landing on Go, money for landing on Free Parking, or not requiring an auction when passing on purchasing a property. All of these common house rules artificially extend the game by either injecting cash into the game or slowing the acquisition of property. A vanilla game of 4 player monopoly should take no more than an hour.

To me the problem with Monopoly isn't just that it takes forever, but that you can get into a commanding position early and spend most of the game slowly bleeding your opponents to death one by one. Monopoly is a game to resent people over.

To go a little off topic: this is the same style of poison that causes MOBAs to have such toxic communities, exacerbated by almost complete anonymity. At the lower levels, easily 95% of games are decided in the first 10 minutes but last 30-40. Only once you reach professional or near-professional play do you hit the point at which most games end within a minute or two of the winner becoming obvious.

Re: The Man Who Built Catan

#102

Post by thedufer »

tmhedberg wrote: post #82
ntaso wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you like Catan, check out one of the apps for Android/iPhone that uses an algorithm to make the basic setup more fair. I tried one for Android a few times and it was always a close call. The game was much more engaging for players that have a bad start than if you set up the game in the proposed fashion. Usually, the algorithms do stuff like: - if there's a 6 and 8 next to each other, the third field is always a 2…

> - if there's a 6 and 8 next to each other, the third field is always a 2 or 12 At least in the version of the game that I own, if you follow the prescribed setup rules, there can never be an adjacent 6 and 8. The terrain tiles are randomized, but the placement of the numbers on the tiles is deterministic, and results in a spatially uniform distribution of the high-yield numbers.

> the placement of the numbers on the tiles is deterministic

Not quite; the random placement of the desert tiles affects it, and you choose at random where to begin placing. That said, its still impossible for there to be adjacent 6s/8s.

Re: The Man Who Built Catan

#103

Post by thedufer »

YokoZar wrote: post #31
habosa wrote: post #10

My friends and I just got into Catan and it's really great. We used to play a ton of FIFA and Madden when we were together, now it's always "who wants to settle?". It really is a great game because it can't be completely beaten like Monopoly can and there is no best strategy that we've found. I play totally differently than my friends and we all win sometimes. I also love the social aspects of trading and the robber.…

Catan got really popular when I was in college, and I noticed a distinctly different playstyle among the "normal" groups of friends I had and the ones that came from the Economics department. A lot of people never think to do things like: - Pay the robber to rob someone else - Ask the robber what card he wants to take from you, and if it's something you're willing to give up just show him which card it is in your han…

We allow people to trade futures i.e. the next of a particular resource they get must be handed over. This means that they don't clear within a turn, but leads to interesting economics - you can trade away risk, usually at a significant cost. Its easy to avoid conflicts - if you've already traded your next wheat, you can't trade it again until you get one (but you could, for instance, trade your 2nd future wheat).

Re: The Man Who Built Catan

#105

Post by mbrameld »

Pxtl wrote: post #14
graylights wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that Catan is much less complex monopoly. Just that most people learn monopoly at a very young age so they never notice the complexity. Monopoly's rules are 6 pages of pure text. Catan's rules are 4 pages with some illustration. I don't understand at all why monopoly is the universal board game that every kid learns. It's a horrible game that drags on for hours. Even though I don't particular care for Catan…

I'll disagree with the Catan-is-less-complicated. For one thing, Monopoly builds on the familiar roll-and-move mechanic. For another, Catan's setup process is hellishly complex. Maybe if you bought the Family Edition (where you can't customize the board), then Catan is simpler, but otherwise? Catan's manual is short because it's excessively terse. I've never seen anybody successfully learn Catan from the instruction…

I don't think Catan's setup is that complex. The board edges have numbered ends, you just match numbers. Then you can either set the hex tiles like they show in the manual or you can shuffle them and set them randomly. Then you set out the numbers in the order the manual specifies. That's not that hard.

Re: The Man Who Built Catan

#106

Post by contingencies »

Pxtl wrote: post #18

The great thing about Catan is how it's a wedge. It's a gateway drug into the world of modern boardgames (I don't say Eurogames because there's some fantastic Ameritrash). People who play Catan are then amicable to try out other fun great games like Ticket To Ride and Small World.

For those wanting modern boardgame picks, my current recommendations are Bohnanza (cute German card game about bean-farming ... I like it even though I generally detest card games), Caribbean (a little like the computer game Pirates! meets Age of Empires), Cornish Smuggler (just great, with bonus anti-authoritarian streak), Pandemic (fast, very adaptable to different numbers of players, and the best cooperative game ever published), Risk 2210 (for 4 players with 4+ hours to burn), and Ticket to Ride. I've played quite a few board games with groups or in cafes in China, LA, London, Thailand (where my friend is the Thai Catan licensee/distributor), and try new ones fairly regularly.

Re: The Man Who Built Catan

#107

Post by Pxtl »

talmand wrote: post #76
Pxtl wrote: post #18

The great thing about Catan is how it's a wedge. It's a gateway drug into the world of modern boardgames (I don't say Eurogames because there's some fantastic Ameritrash). People who play Catan are then amicable to try out other fun great games like Ticket To Ride and Small World.

Is "Ameritrash" supposed to be a positive or negative labeling?

It's a negative label to a genre that actually contains some good games - that's my point. See risk 2210 for an example of good Ameritrash. Ameritrash describes games that are more violent and simulationist - crude wargames for teens and the like. The opposite of the elegant, dry, abstract Eurogames. But there are excellent ameritrash games.

Re: The Man Who Built Catan

#108

Post by Pxtl »

philwelch wrote: post #38
Pxtl wrote: post #18

The great thing about Catan is how it's a wedge. It's a gateway drug into the world of modern boardgames (I don't say Eurogames because there's some fantastic Ameritrash). People who play Catan are then amicable to try out other fun great games like Ticket To Ride and Small World.

I thought the distinction between "Eurogames" and "Ameritrash" had more to do with design style than actual nationality.

Absolutely, and there are games that follow the ameritrash design style that are good. risk 2210 is my go-to example.

Re: The Man Who Built Catan

#109

Post by nostrademons »

nnnnni wrote: post #64
chimeracoder wrote: post #3

Catan was my first German-style board game[0]. I've since "graduated" on to more complicated games, so I rarely play it anymore, but I find that it's an effective "gateway" German-style board game. Almost all of my friends who have played it love it, and have gone on to try (and enjoy) other German-style games. Catan is nice because it's sufficiently more complex (and well-designed) than Monopoly so as to be interest…

The problem with Puerto Rico is that there is often only one optimal move -- and sometimes that optimal move doesn't do anything for you, it only spoils someone else's strategy.

But that's probably the best part of it. Your Puerto Rico skills go way up when you realize it's a game of relative advantage and not absolute advantage, and that your best strategy involves keeping careful tabs on what your opponents are about to do and either thwarting them or incentivizing them to do things that are good for you.

It's like chess or go in that you need to keep careful tabs on your opponent, but can be played with 3-5 players.

Re: The Man Who Built Catan

#110

Post by epsylon »

michaelochurch wrote: post #96
epsylon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly wouldn't deny it. I'd much rather play Catan than most games, anyway.

I created a card game (Ambition) to unify the German aesthetic and the trick-taking genre, which turned out to be hard to do. The problem is that it still has too much luck (dealt hands) to appeal to the German-style crowd, but it's too complex for the people who enjoy card games for simplicity [0] (e.g. Hearts, Poker). So it's kinda "between worlds". I feel like Catan might suffer that if it came out today, even tho…

> The problem is that it still has too much luck (dealt hands) to appeal to the German-style crowd

Well it depends, when there are dealt hands, we usually do some kind of drafting with my group (even when it's specifically written in the rules) because it helps dealing with the randomness factor a lot, while still providing the added re-playability that cards add in a game (and other random factors, like dices - for example in Myrmes, where they determine events that are common to all the players).

Agrikola for example features a LOT of cards which add an incredible depth to the game, and drafting allows you to carefully prepare your combos and make sure that you don't get too many or too few good cards. There's randomness in the way the Agrikola board is setup as well, so overall there's a lot of replay value with that game. For me it's one of the greatest example of modern German-style games.

(I mentioned Race for the Galaxy earlier, and it's a card game only, but there's a ton of strategy within it, and drafting + using the provided starting worlds helps mitigating the randomness out of it. (A few patch to the rules can be used as well for experienced players). Sometimes you'll be a bit lucky or unlucky, but the upside is that with experienced players, games are short and luck averages out quickly.)

> I like German games a lot but I'm not a fan of the "if it has dice or cards, it's not worth playing" mentality that I sometimes see. Games have a variety of social purposes. Sometimes I want to play something like Cards Against Humanity and sometimes I want to play Tigris and Euphrates. Ain't nothing wrong with that. (I do get annoyed with the people who only want to play Texas Hold 'em, though.)

I completely agree.

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