4 ms·

Settlers brings out my angry side. I had a period of playing 1 on 1 with my wife, and she kept winning. That wasn't the frustrating part - what I didn't like wa

Settlers brings out my angry side. I had a period of playing 1 on 1 with my wife, and she kept winning. That wasn't the frustrating part - what I didn't like was how early leads compound into larger leads as the game rolls on. So you know you are going to lose, and you just keep losing more. Much like Monopoly. At least with games like chess, you might be down but you still have some hope of coming back with some maneuvering. Maybe what I didn't like was the parallels with life. There's not usually a rabbit in the hat to come out on top, the rich just get richer.

ben7799 1y ago
I never played enough Settlers to pick up on this but I totally get it with Monopoly, and I feel like this is bad game design when it happens. Monopoly feels like the game might take 4 hours but you know 20 minutes in that you're hopelessly behind and cannot come back. Then it's just 3 hours and 40 minutes of torture. If you're doomed to lose the game should be over quick.
- soperj 1y ago
  > If you're doomed to lose the game should be over quick. I think most people are in this situation in life, but would disagree with you. The game itself was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies, hard to get the message when it's over quickly.
  - praptak 1y ago
    Yes, this design was intentional. Moreover, Monopoly as we know it today was intended to be one of two rulesets, the sucky one. The good one was intended to demonstrate a better alternative.
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- nothrabannosir 1y ago
  In the case of Monopoly that feeling is the point of the game: > The history of Monopoly can be traced back to 1903,[1][8] when American anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie created a game called The Landlord's Game that she hoped would explain the single-tax theory of Henry George as laid out in his book Progress and Poverty. It was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies. She took out a patent in 1904. Her game was self-published beginning in 1906.[9][10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)
- Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
  > Monopoly feels like the game might take 4 hours For what it's worth, if you play Monopoly by the actual rules, and you don't act stupidly stingy on your trade offers, a 4-player game of Monopoly shouldn't take more than 30-45 minutes. The problem is, people of course don't like losing, and everybody loves a comeback story. So people play with house rules that constantly inject extra money into the game, which prolongs the game's purpose: For all the wealth to consolidate to a single player. House rules in Monopoly are so common that a lot of people don't even realize they're playing house rules! Do you give money for landing on Free Parking? You're playing a house rule. Do you give $400 instead of $200 for LANDING on Go? You're playing a house rule. Do you allow purchasing Hotels when there aren't enough houses? Do you allow building to not be even? Do you use some sort of object to act like a hotel because the game only comes with 12 hotels in the box? You're playing house rules. The fact there are only 12 hotels and 32 houses was a deliberate design choice to force players to trade and allow one player to horde all the houses and hotels. You can't mortgage properties that have buildings on them. You must sell the buildings first, and you only get half of what you paid for them from the bank. When you unmortage, you have to pay an extra 10% fee. You don't collect rent on mortgaged properties. If you play any differently, you're playing a house rule. Rolling doubles 3 times sends you to jail. That's actually NOT a house rule! Speaking of jail, you DO still collect rent while in it! This means that deliberately staying in jail can actually be a strategic move if another player is possibly about to land on your dark Green properties (Baltic, North Carolina, Pennsylvania) while your opponent owns the Oranges, which you're likely to land on immediately after leaving jail. Don't get me wrong, Monopoly is a shitty game for many reasons, but "Games take 2+ hours" is not one of them unless you're playing it wrong.
  - alabastervlog 1y ago
    Monopoly’s maybe the only board game I prefer playing in computerized form. Even the one on the NES is totally fine. Rules enforced without having to remember them, auctions run for you, nobody has to be the banker, no manual book-keeping for how much is owed where and mortgage status and all that. Plays so much faster and smoother than the real thing, and no dumb house rules making it last forever for no good reason.
  - 1y ago
reducesuffering 1y ago
It's designed better for 4 players. In that case, 3 other players directing all 7 robbers and knight robbers to the clear lead really acts as a negative feedback loop to counter any snowball. That's not nearly as possible from just 1 behind player
mgh2 1y ago
Not exactly a parallel with monopoly, which I agree, is like life, where early advantages results in the rich getting richer, the injustice makes it boring and frustrating. In Settlers there are actually strategies and "luck" is more evenly distributed. You can vary your approach or strategy - ex: by focusing on upgrading to cities as early as possible to give you 2x advantage, regardless of starting locations. Parallel to life: birth location determines most of luck in life (opportunities, income, connections, friends), but you can increase this advantage by moving, within certain constraints (education, visa, marriage, etc.). Nevertheless, luck is certainly the most important factor. In a better and not broken world, laws (rules of the game) will try to avoid the 1st and reflect the later. Ex: antitrust, immigration, affirmative action, etc.
- GeneralMayhem 1y ago
  Settlers might have less of a snowball effect than Monopoly, but it's definitely there. Pretty much any resource-gathering game is going to have it. If your resource numbers get rolled early on, you get to be the first one to build a city or a third settlement. Then your income is higher, so you'll get to the 4th point faster. And so on. Like another commentor said, the intended fix for this in Settlers is social dynamics: the leader is going to be blocked from the best settling spots, isn't going to get favorable trade deals, and is going to get hammered by the robber. The key strategic gameplay in Settlers is not about profit maximization (that's pretty easy to do), it's about minimizing any appearance that you're a threat until it's too late to do anything about it. If players never collaborate to take down the leader, then early gains can definitely beget later gains.
  - alabastervlog 1y ago
    Even with the social fix, there’s usually one person (sometimes two!) in a four-player game who does nothing wrong but is basically out by the second or third time around the board, just hanging around to help the one or two other non-lead players harass the leader but with no viable path to victory short of an insane run of luck with the dice (or, if you’re me, as soon you realize this has happened to you, you help the leader get ahead faster so you can move on to a better game sooner…)
cycomanic 1y ago
I think that might be a function of playing 1 on 1. At some point (when settlers was still only popular in Germany), we (4 player game) played with one of my best friends flatmates who was at the time winning a lot of the tournaments in Germany. He would consistently whoop our butts no matter how the game started (and all others of us were pretty big board gamers as well). It was amazing to see how little he relied on chance, his dominance became even more apparent once we used the cities and knights extension.
hibikir 1y ago
Settlers is a poor 2 player game: It's really designed for more. Then balance comes form bashing the leader mechanisms: Unfavorable trades, robber uses always hitting them and so on.
- jbverschoor 1y ago
  Yeah I’m so sick of getting bashed haha
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  Settlers of Catan explicitly requires 3 players, in fact. I'm not terribly surprised it doesn't work great with 2.
  - mzs 1y ago
    You can apply The Settlers of Zarahemla setup and trading rules to Catan (while avoiding the additional mechanics in Zarahemla) to create a 2-player Catan. It does have the problem xivzgrev mentioned if you do not each secretly adopt different atypical strategies each game.
snarf21 1y ago
We are living in the renaissance of board game design right now. Settlers is a step forward from Monopoly but is still just a roll-and-do and it also suffers horribly from king making and other design problems. There are so many amazing board games out there right now for every skill level and taste.
- ungreased0675 1y ago
  Would you recommend a few that are beginner friendly and available at my local board game shop?
  - daedrdev 1y ago
    "Dune: Imperium" for a more competitive and strategic game (there are several board games for dune but they only share the theme, don't get confused) Wingspan if you don't want to be aggressive against other players Cascadia for shorter game that supports low player counts Azul is another shorter game The isle of cats is a personal favorite, very neat game about packing cats on your boat Red Rising has an excellent board game if you've ever read the book.
    - stoneman24 1y ago
      I recently joined a board game club after many years away from the hobby. I’ll echo the recommendations above. Scored wins in Azul and Loot. Played Isle of cats and Wingspan. Games around the 3-4 players seem to have best flow and pace. I may buy wyrm (sister game to wingspan) just for the card designs. I did play a game of Twilight Imperium for 12 hours, which I won. Mostly newbie’s but with a host who’s provided guidance on the rules. Great fun but perhaps something to work up to.
      - daedrdev 1y ago
        I agree on the 3-4 player idea, more players is hard because people have too much downtime. I enjoy and have played several games of Twilight Imperium but you need a good group who are willing to play fair even if the game is hopeless for themselves.
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ben7799 1y ago

I never played enough Settlers to pick up on this but I totally get it with Monopoly, and I feel like this is bad game design when it happens. Monopoly feels like the game might take 4 hours but you know 20 minutes in that you're hopelessly behind and cannot come back. Then it's just 3 hours and 40 minutes of torture. If you're doomed to lose the game should be over quick.

soperj 1y ago
> If you're doomed to lose the game should be over quick. I think most people are in this situation in life, but would disagree with you. The game itself was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies, hard to get the message when it's over quickly.
- praptak 1y ago
  Yes, this design was intentional. Moreover, Monopoly as we know it today was intended to be one of two rulesets, the sucky one. The good one was intended to demonstrate a better alternative.
deleted 1y ago
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nothrabannosir 1y ago
In the case of Monopoly that feeling is the point of the game: > The history of Monopoly can be traced back to 1903,[1][8] when American anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie created a game called The Landlord's Game that she hoped would explain the single-tax theory of Henry George as laid out in his book Progress and Poverty. It was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies. She took out a patent in 1904. Her game was self-published beginning in 1906.[9][10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)
Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
> Monopoly feels like the game might take 4 hours For what it's worth, if you play Monopoly by the actual rules, and you don't act stupidly stingy on your trade offers, a 4-player game of Monopoly shouldn't take more than 30-45 minutes. The problem is, people of course don't like losing, and everybody loves a comeback story. So people play with house rules that constantly inject extra money into the game, which prolongs the game's purpose: For all the wealth to consolidate to a single player. House rules in Monopoly are so common that a lot of people don't even realize they're playing house rules! Do you give money for landing on Free Parking? You're playing a house rule. Do you give $400 instead of $200 for LANDING on Go? You're playing a house rule. Do you allow purchasing Hotels when there aren't enough houses? Do you allow building to not be even? Do you use some sort of object to act like a hotel because the game only comes with 12 hotels in the box? You're playing house rules. The fact there are only 12 hotels and 32 houses was a deliberate design choice to force players to trade and allow one player to horde all the houses and hotels. You can't mortgage properties that have buildings on them. You must sell the buildings first, and you only get half of what you paid for them from the bank. When you unmortage, you have to pay an extra 10% fee. You don't collect rent on mortgaged properties. If you play any differently, you're playing a house rule. Rolling doubles 3 times sends you to jail. That's actually NOT a house rule! Speaking of jail, you DO still collect rent while in it! This means that deliberately staying in jail can actually be a strategic move if another player is possibly about to land on your dark Green properties (Baltic, North Carolina, Pennsylvania) while your opponent owns the Oranges, which you're likely to land on immediately after leaving jail. Don't get me wrong, Monopoly is a shitty game for many reasons, but "Games take 2+ hours" is not one of them unless you're playing it wrong.
- alabastervlog 1y ago
  Monopoly’s maybe the only board game I prefer playing in computerized form. Even the one on the NES is totally fine. Rules enforced without having to remember them, auctions run for you, nobody has to be the banker, no manual book-keeping for how much is owed where and mortgage status and all that. Plays so much faster and smoother than the real thing, and no dumb house rules making it last forever for no good reason.
- 1y ago

reducesuffering 1y ago

It's designed better for 4 players. In that case, 3 other players directing all 7 robbers and knight robbers to the clear lead really acts as a negative feedback loop to counter any snowball. That's not nearly as possible from just 1 behind player

mgh2 1y ago

Not exactly a parallel with monopoly, which I agree, is like life, where early advantages results in the rich getting richer, the injustice makes it boring and frustrating. In Settlers there are actually strategies and "luck" is more evenly distributed. You can vary your approach or strategy - ex: by focusing on upgrading to cities as early as possible to give you 2x advantage, regardless of starting locations. Parallel to life: birth location determines most of luck in life (opportunities, income, connections, friends), but you can increase this advantage by moving, within certain constraints (education, visa, marriage, etc.). Nevertheless, luck is certainly the most important factor. In a better and not broken world, laws (rules of the game) will try to avoid the 1st and reflect the later. Ex: antitrust, immigration, affirmative action, etc.

GeneralMayhem 1y ago
Settlers might have less of a snowball effect than Monopoly, but it's definitely there. Pretty much any resource-gathering game is going to have it. If your resource numbers get rolled early on, you get to be the first one to build a city or a third settlement. Then your income is higher, so you'll get to the 4th point faster. And so on. Like another commentor said, the intended fix for this in Settlers is social dynamics: the leader is going to be blocked from the best settling spots, isn't going to get favorable trade deals, and is going to get hammered by the robber. The key strategic gameplay in Settlers is not about profit maximization (that's pretty easy to do), it's about minimizing any appearance that you're a threat until it's too late to do anything about it. If players never collaborate to take down the leader, then early gains can definitely beget later gains.
- alabastervlog 1y ago
  Even with the social fix, there’s usually one person (sometimes two!) in a four-player game who does nothing wrong but is basically out by the second or third time around the board, just hanging around to help the one or two other non-lead players harass the leader but with no viable path to victory short of an insane run of luck with the dice (or, if you’re me, as soon you realize this has happened to you, you help the leader get ahead faster so you can move on to a better game sooner…)

cycomanic 1y ago

I think that might be a function of playing 1 on 1. At some point (when settlers was still only popular in Germany), we (4 player game) played with one of my best friends flatmates who was at the time winning a lot of the tournaments in Germany. He would consistently whoop our butts no matter how the game started (and all others of us were pretty big board gamers as well). It was amazing to see how little he relied on chance, his dominance became even more apparent once we used the cities and knights extension.

hibikir 1y ago

Settlers is a poor 2 player game: It's really designed for more. Then balance comes form bashing the leader mechanisms: Unfavorable trades, robber uses always hitting them and so on.

jbverschoor 1y ago
Yeah I’m so sick of getting bashed haha
bigstrat2003 1y ago
Settlers of Catan explicitly requires 3 players, in fact. I'm not terribly surprised it doesn't work great with 2.
- mzs 1y ago
  You can apply The Settlers of Zarahemla setup and trading rules to Catan (while avoiding the additional mechanics in Zarahemla) to create a 2-player Catan. It does have the problem xivzgrev mentioned if you do not each secretly adopt different atypical strategies each game.

snarf21 1y ago

We are living in the renaissance of board game design right now. Settlers is a step forward from Monopoly but is still just a roll-and-do and it also suffers horribly from king making and other design problems. There are so many amazing board games out there right now for every skill level and taste.

ungreased0675 1y ago
Would you recommend a few that are beginner friendly and available at my local board game shop?
- daedrdev 1y ago
  "Dune: Imperium" for a more competitive and strategic game (there are several board games for dune but they only share the theme, don't get confused) Wingspan if you don't want to be aggressive against other players Cascadia for shorter game that supports low player counts Azul is another shorter game The isle of cats is a personal favorite, very neat game about packing cats on your boat Red Rising has an excellent board game if you've ever read the book.
  - stoneman24 1y ago
    I recently joined a board game club after many years away from the hobby. I’ll echo the recommendations above. Scored wins in Azul and Loot. Played Isle of cats and Wingspan. Games around the 3-4 players seem to have best flow and pace. I may buy wyrm (sister game to wingspan) just for the card designs. I did play a game of Twilight Imperium for 12 hours, which I won. Mostly newbie’s but with a host who’s provided guidance on the rules. Great fun but perhaps something to work up to.
    - daedrdev 1y ago
      I agree on the 3-4 player idea, more players is hard because people have too much downtime. I enjoy and have played several games of Twilight Imperium but you need a good group who are willing to play fair even if the game is hopeless for themselves.

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