Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Man Who Built Catan

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 113 posts

Re: The Man Who Built Catan

#91

Post by jon-wood »

frik wrote: post #71
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…

I have no evidence but Catan [0] feels to me like a board-game copy of the german "The Settlers" [1] computer game. I own both the board game and the earlier video games. The Settlers video game is a more complex and is more like Age of Empires (a few years later) but with a focus on low level business and building up of an economy. You need a forester, lumberjack and a sawmill to get planks. You need a well, a corn…

If you enjoy The Settlers you should find a copy of the 10th Anniversary Edition from somewhere - the game has been near perfectly ported to a modern engine without changing any of the actual rules.

Re: The Man Who Built Catan

#92

Post by Zikes »

talmand wrote: post #77

For those who might be interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3WJTlDa7oo This is a Table Top episode hosted by Wil Wheaton playing Settlers of Catan. There is also another episode where they play the Star Trek variation. Also, if you haven't seen this series and are interested in board games I highly suggest you watch other episodes. The level of interest will vary from episode to episode based on whether you li…

I've also made several purchases based on that show and recommend everyone give them a watch.

They're also organizing the upcoming International TableTop Day at http://www.tabletopday.com/, and are very proud of how they almost got the ISS involved in last year's but that fell through at the last minute.

Re: The Man Who Built Catan

#93

Post by Someone »

twoodfin wrote: post #33
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.

In my experience Monopoly games played by the official rules with experienced players would drag endlessly due to trade negotiations. Typically, whenever a player was clearly in an advantageous position, the remaining players would form a loose alliance, shuffling properties and cash in an attempt to stymie the leader. The leader would fall back into the pack, a new leader would emerge, and the whole process would re…

"The biggest problem we encountered in both games was the "spoiler": The player who was not in a position to win, but was in a position to determine the winner."

I guess you are not a fan of Diplomacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(game)), either.

Most, if not all, games of more than two players where players have some free choice eventually boil down to "you can't win it alone. You need help or a blooper from your enemy"

And that is true in sports, too. In any distance running, starting at 800m, athletes collectively make a choice whether to run a fast race or a slow race with a very fast finish. A fast sprinter will not win a fast race, so runners with lower top speed will try to make a fast race. Still, they won't want to be running in the front, they rather have another runner with lower top speed burn energy doing that.

This gets more evident the longer the distance and the larger the advantage of running in the slipstream of an opponent. Road races in cycling are perhaps the ultimate example. If "the peloton" doesn't want you to win, you have to be extremely good _and_ lucky to win.

Re: The Man Who Built Catan

#94

Post by epsylon »

michaelochurch wrote: post #85
epsylon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, Monopoly is really a terrible game. It's mostly a game of luck (getting the good dice rolls). Catan is nice, but it does suffer from the same problem, the dice rolls influence way too much of the game. My personal favorites for long games are: The Game of Thrones board game, which is really awesome with the right set of players because it favors a lot diplomacy and strategy (the biggest problem with it…

Catan really invented the "German" aesthetic. Yes, it has dice, and yes, there's luck; but it deserves a lot of credit because it was the first.

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

Re: The Man Who Built Catan

#95

Post by derefr »

talmand wrote: post #74
mseebach wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the game this is exemplified by forcing you to progress through life on a preset course and force you to pay rents to the incumbents that you come across on that narrow path. The dice roll of course represents that life is unpredictable. But I struggle to find the real world analogy where I go bankrupt because I randomly end up in a hotel in Park Avenue.

Never mind the fact that you are forced to move every day from a location you likely can easily afford to a new location not knowing whether you can afford it or not. How can you plan for the future when you move from $200 rent to $2000 rent in a single day with no new income? What strange shenanigans is going on that compels me to move so much? Especially moving into hotels when I previously lived in a house. For th…

Modern economics? No. Land-title-era economics, where owning land meant you had autocratic control over it and could kick people out of it? Yes. To translate to modern economics, you have to change the names of things a bit.

Picture each set of colored properties as a separate country. You are an entrepreneur, so when you land in a country, you implicitly try to start a business there. The "base rent" for that country is the cost of doing business--corporate tax rate et al.

Each square within a country is an industry. As you build "houses" and then "hotels", you take over that industry. (Houses and hotels themselves make sense as markers if the industry you're taking over is real-estate; otherwise, interpret them as the symbolic equivalents for their own industry. For a manufacturing industry, this would be exclusivity deals with parts of the supply chain. Etc.)

When you've got a full set of houses on a square, you have a monopoly in that industry. This isn't as useful, though, as having bargaining/lobbying power from multiple industries that operate in the same country--having houses on all the squares. When you do that, you can convince the government to give you their contracts--to enforce the mega-monopolies for you, like in telecommunications or defense. These claims are represented by the hotels.

When you land on a square, and someone else has a monopoly there already? Your implicit entrepreneurial bid will be quite a bit more costly. But, of course, your customers expect you to expand into new territories, even if someone else controls them, so expand you must.

(I'm not sure what the railroads and such then represent, though. There aren't that many global utilities that actually give people power when they control them; the shipping-container era kind of fixed that. The internet backbone might seem to be a contender, but it doesn't really make that much money for the people who control it.)

Re: The Man Who Built Catan

#96

Post by michaelochurch »

epsylon wrote: post #94
michaelochurch wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Catan really invented the "German" aesthetic. Yes, it has dice, and yes, there's luck; but it deserves a lot of credit because it was the first.

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 though it's a great game in its own right.

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.)

[0]: I don't mean to imply that these games are without depth. It's just that the rules are simple, and the complexity comes more from the players.

Re: The Man Who Built Catan

#97

Post by the_watcher »

Catan is incredible to me. We picked it up in a thrift shop in a rural eastern Washington town, thinking it was some relic of the 70s (this was probably 1998 or something). We played it on family vacations and never thought about it outside of them. Then, all of a sudden, it exploded in popularity. Really cool story.

Re: The Man Who Built Catan

#98

Post by talmand »

derefr wrote: post #95
talmand wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never mind the fact that you are forced to move every day from a location you likely can easily afford to a new location not knowing whether you can afford it or not. How can you plan for the future when you move from $200 rent to $2000 rent in a single day with no new income? What strange shenanigans is going on that compels me to move so much? Especially moving into hotels when I previously lived in a house. For th…

Modern economics? No. Land-title-era economics, where owning land meant you had autocratic control over it and could kick people out of it? Yes. To translate to modern economics, you have to change the names of things a bit. Picture each set of colored properties as a separate country. You are an entrepreneur, so when you land in a country, you implicitly try to start a business there. The "base rent" for that countr…

Bravo, you've somehow made Monopoly seem even more complex. You should run with this and design a board around it.

Re: The Man Who Built Catan

#99

Post by Yhippa »

michaelochurch wrote: post #88
geddes wrote: post #4

Is Catan really Silicon Valley's golf, like the article claims? I'd love to think so but I haven't seen any deals cemented over a game of Catan. Anyone have any stories?

Is Catan really Silicon Valley's golf, like the article claims? I'd believe it of the old Silicon Valley. The new one, with Snapchat and Clinkle and spider pooping and expensive real estate and multiple liquidation preferences? Probably not. I think golf is the new golf in Silicon Valley.

I had to look up spider pooping. People can't possibly be doing that. Wow.

Re: The Man Who Built Catan

#100

Post by 205guy »

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…

That no-randomness mentality is a bit odd, but I admit that some games don't integrate it well. In Catan, I think the random element is well-done because it is the board and its distribution of resources that is random, not so much each player's turn.

I'm not sure what a "German aesthetic" would be in a card game, but one Austrian trick-taking card game that is a lot of fun is Schnapsen. The cards are random, the trump is random, and you draw cards each turn adding temporal randomness, but outwitting the randomness (and your opponent) is part of the appeal. It's slightly complex (a bit more than Hearts), but still way simpler than Bridge. Each round is fairly fast (5-10 minutes), and you can play a match (to 7 points) under an hour.

Apparently, it's called Sixty-Six (Sechsundsechzig) in Germany, though Schnapsen is a variant.

http://www.pagat.com/marriage/schnaps.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixty-six_%28card_game%29

Post reply on HN