8 ms·

Perfect German Board Game Redefines Genre

181 points by nadim 18y ago

mkinsella 18y ago
Anyone interested in board games should check out http://www.boardgamegeek.com http://www.boardgamegeek.com. It's an amazing resource.
- misuba 18y ago
  Why is there still no usable way for me to add my collection of games to BoardGameGeek? I've got to load the page for each game I own and click "I own this" separately. Even for a modest-sized collection like mine, this is enough to stop me from using what's obviously a tremendously powerful community tool.
  - blinks 18y ago
    They just redesigned the backend; hopefully this'll make changes like that easier. Personally, every so often I want to make my own version, but the user data on BGG is so useful, I think it might keep others out of the market.
nadim 18y ago
Here's one thing that stuck out to me, his iteration and testing on real people: """Every once in a while, he would bring the new game upstairs to test it out on his family. They would play along, but Teuber could tell that the game wasn't working. Sometimes, in the middle of a match, he would notice his youngest son, Benny, reading a comic under the table. Other times his wife would suddenly remember a load of laundry that needed immediate attention. After each of these sessions, Teuber would haul the game back downstairs for further refinement. He repeated this process over the course of four years."""
- misuba 18y ago
  Of course! Games are essentially just user interface - imagine if your software product didn't _have_ an underlying set of tasks that had to be accomplished, or even a mental model on the user's part of what was being done. How much more important would UI testing be?
  - bendotc 18y ago
    As one of several game makers on HN, I want to take issue with the idea that "games are essentially just user interface." Games almost always present an interface to an underlying system. Many games have an underlying system that is not particularly simple or intuitive and take significant effort to learn. And, because unlike tools, they do not offer to assist the user in doing something that she already knows she wants to do, we often provide many more incentives along the way, as struggling with a system is often not amusing, and amusement is usually the goal. This is all to say that the UI is very important, but to consider games as chiefly UI is to fundamentally misunderstand what games are and how we interact with them.
    - pchristensen 18y ago
      bendoct, I'm looking to create an informal group for game hackers/makers. Email me if you're interested. Ditto for anyone else interested. peter [at] pchristensen [dot] com
    - misuba 18y ago
      Yeah, my statement's only true in certain senses. It might be more accurate, with tabletop games at least, to say that games are a UI to the other players - that is, they channel social interactions in certain ways.
      - nazgulnarsil 18y ago
        this is my feeling. the games that last are ones that distill some aspect of friendly competition between people. and the very best games are the ones that cause you to interact with your friends in some new way (games that involve auctions or mini-economies tend to do this well)
- plinkplonk 18y ago
  I was about to cut and paste this very section. that is some serious user testing / design!
- dkarl 18y ago
  What jumped out at me was that his wife and children tolerated it for four years.
  - eru 18y ago
    He was already making money with his other games.
sant0sk1 18y ago
I learned how to play this a few weeks ago. I had no idea at the time that I was playing a "perfect" board game! Seriously, though. It was just okay. The game always ended just when things were getting interesting.
- tipjoy 18y ago
  You need to play with the 'cities and knights' extension. It makes the game more complex. Also try the board game Puerto Rico, which we're just getting into but seems pretty awesome.
  - pmjordan 18y ago
    Does it reduce the luck element a little? We have the base game and the Seafarers expansion, and we got a little bored with it. The key seems to be picking the right starting positions, the rest is mostly plain luck. (and relentless trading of resources) I think they redesigned the game recently, so it's possible the new version of the expansions won't work with our original edition anyway. These days, we're mostly into Puerto Rico, Ticket to Ride (various editions), Carcassonne (also somewhat luck-based), Power Grid/Funkenschlag and Agricola.
    - tipjoy 18y ago
      Seafarers just makes the game bigger. Cities & Knights makes it more complex (as well as making it bigger).
      - pmjordan 18y ago
        But does it add more depth of strategy/tactics? Complex rules don't mean it's not still primarily luck.
        misuba 18y ago
        C&K basically gives players more ways to affect the game's outcome through actual decisions (more of which are sorely needed). I haven't played it myself so I can't say how effective they are, but it's a step.
rjprins 18y ago
I don't really like it, I guess it's a personal preference, but I need a game where skill is just a little bit more important. When I play Catan I just feel like I'm following a train track - zero options. I prefer Warcraft, the board game! :)
- mcu 18y ago
  Truly one of my favorite board games! That, Twilight Imperium, and A Game of Thrones!
  - spyrosk 18y ago
    Twilight Imperium is really great. A couple of others that I really liked is Android and Arkham Horror (different style though). Has anyone played Diplomacy and/or Long live the King? I love their concept, although I haven't played any of them.. Slightly off-topic: I play a lot of rpg's, but for some reason I don't like their newer versions, ie d&d v3+, vampire: the requiem etc. Are there any others who have gone through the different versions? How do you feel about the most recent ones?
- misuba 18y ago
  Yes! The original WarCraft board game is way underrated - mostly because you have to download a patch (yes, for a board game) and because it doesn't come with fancy molded plastic pieces. It's much more for the hardcore tabletop gamer, though. (As is the StarCraft board game, which is quite different but also wonderful.)
thomaspaine 18y ago
I used to play this game all the time, but eventually just got tired of it. It became too predictable.
josh_nyc 18y ago
I was introduced to Catan during college and we quickly had a weekly game going. The interplay of luck and skill is intrinsically woven into the gameplay, which kept things very dynamic. The "wheeling/dealing" aspect of the bartering keeps things interesting when it isn't your turn. Just when things would get boring on the skills side (someone was far ahead of everyone else), luck would rush in to make things interesting. Just when things would get boring on the luck side (a series of bad rolls), there would be opportunities to strategize around it. I haven't played it in years, though (not near that group of people anymore), so it was a pleasure to see this pop up on HN. And it is pretty relevant insofar as the "programming" and game loop is quite clever. There are some great online versions too (asobrain, jsettlers, etc... would provide links but I don't know what the best online versions are today).
habibur 18y ago
You can't figure out, what game the article is talking about until you finish reading a lot of text. So here is the link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlers_of_Catan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlers_of_Catan It's called Settlers of Catan.
- Flemlord 18y ago
  And it's a great game. There's also a decent version you can download for XBox 360: http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/puzzle/catan/index.html http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/puzzle/catan/index.html
jcromartie 18y ago
And Puerto Rico is even better :)
syntactic 18y ago
Funny a friend just introduced this game to me a couple weeks ago, it is pretty fun and easy to learn buy in my opinion too short, more like a rush to get 10 points than a thorough strategy game. For the first few games, just when I had my little economy humming along somebody would bust out their ten victory points out of nowhere.
fbailey 18y ago
growing up in germany I lost a lot of my youth time to this game
msluyter 18y ago
Huge boardgame fan checking in. Settlers makes for a great "gateway game," a way to introduce non-gamers to the world of eurogames, but most hardcore gamers in my crowd find it a little too luck driven. We tend to prefer games like Agricola, Powergrid, Caylus, and El Grande these days. But I still think it's a pretty good game. If you're new to boardgames and like Settlers, I recommend going to BGG (boardgamegeek.com) and checking out their list of the top 20 or so games and trying some of those. If you're looking for people to play with, there are a number of active boardgame Meetups. You can also check out http://www.brettspielwelt.de/ http://www.brettspielwelt.de/, which is a German site with a lot of popular boardgames available for online play. Happy gaming!
misuba 18y ago
I agree with a lot of other commenters here that Catan is luck-driven and essentially over (except for a lot of tedious listening to people tell you _again_ that they don't have the resource cards you want) after you make your initial placements. What deserves more attention, though, are the ways in which "worse is better" applies here - the specific things about Catan that make hardcore gamers dislike it are, in many cases, the things that make it popular. For instance, lots of people like to feel that when they win, it's because they were skillful, and when they lose, it's only because they were unlucky. On the other hand, if you really _are_ investing your skills in your decisions but still lose due to luck, you'll be really frustrated. Catan does an excellent job of keeping players busy, but essentially on an equal footing of powerlessness. On this basis it really appeals to people who get all kinds of nervous when asked to play any kind of game of skill with friends.
- blinks 18y ago
  A better game for that group would be Fluxx (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/258 http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/258) -> lots of fun, interesting decisions, but a massive element of luck. In Fluxx, if you know what you're doing and get lucky, you can win extremely fast. If you don't get lucky, though, you're stuck. I've found that people interested in a light-weight game always end up liking it.
  - icefox 18y ago
    Ugg, seems like everyone has a copy of fluxx and while it might take no time to teach or setup it is really not that good of a game unless you are seriously drunk.
  - misuba 18y ago
    ...except that many non-gamers are really flummoxed by the way Fluxx's changing goals keep putting different demands on them. They feel like the rug's been pulled out from under them, when really all that's happening is they're playing a game that's all tactics and no strategy.
  - jvdh 18y ago
    "if you know what you're doing and get lucky, you can win extremely fast." I would turn that around. The luck factor in Fluxx is staggeringly high. However, what makes Fluxx fun is that it does not make any attempt whatsoever to hide that fact. My problem with SoC is that it has a very high luck factor, but that the game also tries very hard to hide that fact. The expansion Cities and Knights or using a deck of cards with the dicerolls make SoC bearable.
falldowngoboom 18y ago
As others have said, I find Settlers to be all about the initial positioning of your pieces. Choose wrong and it's a slow grind to an inevitable defeat.
mapleoin 18y ago
The luck and strategy part is also very nicely done in http://www.wesnoth.org/ http://www.wesnoth.org/ which is inspired by Settlers of Catan and other such games. You might be repulsed by the graphics at first, but after a while you actually get to appreciate them and find that they fit in perfectly.
- jibiki 18y ago
  Wesnoth is nothing like Settlers, but it's still a good game, especially considering the price. IIRC, ESR wrote a campaign for it.
  - mapleoin 18y ago
    yup, ESR is an active contributor. You can find him in #wesnoth@irc.freenode.net sometimes.
sanj 18y ago
If you're playing this game without the "Penny Rule", you're missing out. SoC suffers from a bit of a compound interest effect: a few bad (non-producing) rolls at the beginning can screw you for the entire game. To make up for this: Anytime there is a roll on which a given player doesn't get any resources (and not because of the thief), they are given a penny. During trading, a player can buy a resource from the bank using pennies for the cost of number of victory points showing. This dramatically reduces run-away-winner syndrome.
- time_management 18y ago
  That's a great design hack. Did you come up with it? If only someone could do something similar for mana drought/flood, Magic would be a pretty good game.
  - sanj 18y ago
    I'm not the originator. But I am a convert!
    - time_management 18y ago
      It's nice. It reminds me of the "square root" hack for Gin Rummy, from the guy who came up with the card game Ambition. Square-root hack is as follows: regular rounds are scored on the square root (rounding down) of the deadwood difference, capped at 5 points. Undercuts get a bonus of 3, plus the square root of the differential. Gin scores 4 plus the square root of the opponent's deadwood. So the ranges are: Regular: 1-5 Undercut: 3-6 Gin: 5-13 The victory condition is to have win a round when you have at least 20 points, and you are in the lead. Second-turn Gin is extremely rare, but first- or second-turn knock is not rare. With the regular system, a second-turn knock (pure luck) can be a 60+ round, and that's more than half the game. With this system, it's only 5 points.
  - freakball 18y ago
    Mulligans are built into tournament rules. That being said, I find that they are quite the leveler; high tempo decks with less lands suffer less than a control deck, but need mulligans more often. It's a trade-off, and evens out the playing field more than people realize.
kbrower 18y ago
Can someone please make this game into an iphone/ipod touch app already
- icefox 18y ago
  A lot of the fun of the game is playing with other people, taking and in general hanging out. I get together with a handful of people about once a month to play board games. We try to play one new game every time and then replay the good ones. Puerto Rico, Agricola, Power Grid, Ccitadels, etc. We any of the Boston hackers be interested in joining or starting a startup/hacker board game night?
  - misuba 18y ago
    That said, though, I wonder why there aren't more "hot seat" style mobile games, designed to be played on one handset that gets passed around. Or on many handsets that share game info wirelessly but depend somehow on co-presence in the real world.
    - eru 18y ago
      I've played "Das verrückte Labyrinth" in this way with a friend on two Nintendo DS.
time_management 18y ago
Solid game, but not the best of the genre. Tigris and Euphrases FTW.
- mcu 18y ago
  Tigris is a much deeper game.
albertcardona 18y ago
It's one of the best board games I've ever played. And there is a java version called jsettlers with online ladders and so on, that helped a lot to spread word about Settlers. The java version was created to test artificial intelligence applications for robot players, with some success (although robots never beat a trained human). Settlers as a game pushes the player to discover different business strategies and to commit to them; in between strategies never win. And always to invest! Cards in the hand lose value very fast (and get taken away en masse with a 7, and by the robber as well). It's fascinating. Edit: some here mentioned the "Cities and Knights extension". I have never played the game without them -- even back in 2001, the board game you can buy on a shop already had Cities and Knights included. I didn't know it existed without them at all. Edit 2: the JSettlers applet: http://www.jsettlers.com/ http://www.jsettlers.com/
- brunoqc 18y ago
  We can also play for free on the official website : http://www.cms.playcatan.com/content/view/137/59/lang,en_US/ http://www.cms.playcatan.com/content/view/137/59/lang,en_US/ And there's also another open source version, Pioneers : http://pio.sourceforge.net/ http://pio.sourceforge.net/
  - euccastro 18y ago
    There is a nice Java implementation and community at http://games.asobrain.com http://games.asobrain.com It's called "Xplorers" for copyright reasons.
Tichy 18y ago
It certainly has become the new Monopoly in Germany. I prefer Carcassonne, though, or at the very least, Settlers with the Cities and Knights expansion. Also the settlers of catan card game is very good in my opinion (I like it much better than the board game).
mechanical_fish 18y ago
Have I entered some sort of time warp? I was introduced to this game at the gaming club at Cornell. In 1997. When reading this article I had to keep looking up at the dateline to make sure I hadn't accidentally slipped back into graduate school. Talk about existential terror. The moral of this story is threefold. First: I was a much bigger game geek than I ever thought I was. Second: Your business can take a really long time to reach its full potential. Third: Just because something is old news to you doesn't mean that there aren't lots of people encountering it for the first time.
- electromagnetic 18y ago
  I was never a board game geek, but that might have been a side effect of growing up in the 90's. I had friends who I couldn't hang out with every day, because we lived so far apart. So I ended up being killer at early video games and for the most part I still am although I rarely play the first person shooters or the RTS games anymore due to time (and, for the FPS', interest) constraints. Yet even I knew what Catan is. Even my wife does, I told her about 3 months ago that the next time we waste money on a board game we're actually going to get one I like, so I pointed it out to her. So even for me that was a sort of bizarre 'deja vu' experience. Then again, I grew up in the UK so I suppose this game probably hit the market much bigger and much sooner than in the US. I guess an addendum to your second moral is that foreign markets can act in unexpected ways.
- cos 18y ago
  No, you're not alone. I've been playing Settlers for years, and it's long been a favorite of a number of friends of mine in different cities who don't all know each other. Perhaps it's been a niche game this whole time and will go "mainstream", but its niche hasn't been that obscure.
- ken 18y ago
  Not that this isn't some sort of time-warp article, but haven't you learned by now that Cornell has little in common with reality? We even put it on a bumper sticker. :-)
chris11 18y ago
Here is an unofficial online flash version of Settlers of Cataan. (Registration is required) http://games.asobrain.com/ http://games.asobrain.com/
mynameishere 18y ago
Come on. Nothing beats a good 40-hour marathon of Axis & Allies.
- run4yourlives 18y ago
  40 hours, and all that matters is whoever can hold the Caucasus for longer that 2-3 turns.
2bit 18y ago
I had no idea they were releasing a new PC version soon, that's great news. I'm hoping they introduce a tutorial mode. I've tried introducing friends to PlayCatan.com but having to explain all the rules in chat they lose interest right away.
joshu 18y ago
This is a new thing? I've hated this game for years.
wlievens 18y ago
If you want (as the article claims) a real Monpoly-how-it-should-be game, give Chinatown a try. http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/47 http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/47 It's about free-style trading much like Monopoly should be, except that it doesn't suck.

181 points by nadim 18y ago

Anyone interested in board games should check out http://www.boardgamegeek.com http://www.boardgamegeek.com. It's an amazing resource.

misuba 18y ago
Why is there still no usable way for me to add my collection of games to BoardGameGeek? I've got to load the page for each game I own and click "I own this" separately. Even for a modest-sized collection like mine, this is enough to stop me from using what's obviously a tremendously powerful community tool.
- blinks 18y ago
  They just redesigned the backend; hopefully this'll make changes like that easier. Personally, every so often I want to make my own version, but the user data on BGG is so useful, I think it might keep others out of the market.

nadim 18y ago

Here's one thing that stuck out to me, his iteration and testing on real people: """Every once in a while, he would bring the new game upstairs to test it out on his family. They would play along, but Teuber could tell that the game wasn't working. Sometimes, in the middle of a match, he would notice his youngest son, Benny, reading a comic under the table. Other times his wife would suddenly remember a load of laundry that needed immediate attention. After each of these sessions, Teuber would haul the game back downstairs for further refinement. He repeated this process over the course of four years."""

misuba 18y ago
Of course! Games are essentially just user interface - imagine if your software product didn't _have_ an underlying set of tasks that had to be accomplished, or even a mental model on the user's part of what was being done. How much more important would UI testing be?
- bendotc 18y ago
  As one of several game makers on HN, I want to take issue with the idea that "games are essentially just user interface." Games almost always present an interface to an underlying system. Many games have an underlying system that is not particularly simple or intuitive and take significant effort to learn. And, because unlike tools, they do not offer to assist the user in doing something that she already knows she wants to do, we often provide many more incentives along the way, as struggling with a system is often not amusing, and amusement is usually the goal. This is all to say that the UI is very important, but to consider games as chiefly UI is to fundamentally misunderstand what games are and how we interact with them.
  - pchristensen 18y ago
    bendoct, I'm looking to create an informal group for game hackers/makers. Email me if you're interested. Ditto for anyone else interested. peter [at] pchristensen [dot] com
  - misuba 18y ago
    Yeah, my statement's only true in certain senses. It might be more accurate, with tabletop games at least, to say that games are a UI to the other players - that is, they channel social interactions in certain ways.
    - nazgulnarsil 18y ago
      this is my feeling. the games that last are ones that distill some aspect of friendly competition between people. and the very best games are the ones that cause you to interact with your friends in some new way (games that involve auctions or mini-economies tend to do this well)
plinkplonk 18y ago
I was about to cut and paste this very section. that is some serious user testing / design!
dkarl 18y ago
What jumped out at me was that his wife and children tolerated it for four years.
- eru 18y ago
  He was already making money with his other games.

sant0sk1 18y ago

I learned how to play this a few weeks ago. I had no idea at the time that I was playing a "perfect" board game! Seriously, though. It was just okay. The game always ended just when things were getting interesting.

tipjoy 18y ago
You need to play with the 'cities and knights' extension. It makes the game more complex. Also try the board game Puerto Rico, which we're just getting into but seems pretty awesome.
- pmjordan 18y ago
  Does it reduce the luck element a little? We have the base game and the Seafarers expansion, and we got a little bored with it. The key seems to be picking the right starting positions, the rest is mostly plain luck. (and relentless trading of resources) I think they redesigned the game recently, so it's possible the new version of the expansions won't work with our original edition anyway. These days, we're mostly into Puerto Rico, Ticket to Ride (various editions), Carcassonne (also somewhat luck-based), Power Grid/Funkenschlag and Agricola.
  - tipjoy 18y ago
    Seafarers just makes the game bigger. Cities & Knights makes it more complex (as well as making it bigger).
    - pmjordan 18y ago
      But does it add more depth of strategy/tactics? Complex rules don't mean it's not still primarily luck.
      - misuba 18y ago
        C&K basically gives players more ways to affect the game's outcome through actual decisions (more of which are sorely needed). I haven't played it myself so I can't say how effective they are, but it's a step.

rjprins 18y ago

I don't really like it, I guess it's a personal preference, but I need a game where skill is just a little bit more important. When I play Catan I just feel like I'm following a train track - zero options. I prefer Warcraft, the board game! :)

mcu 18y ago
Truly one of my favorite board games! That, Twilight Imperium, and A Game of Thrones!
- spyrosk 18y ago
  Twilight Imperium is really great. A couple of others that I really liked is Android and Arkham Horror (different style though). Has anyone played Diplomacy and/or Long live the King? I love their concept, although I haven't played any of them.. Slightly off-topic: I play a lot of rpg's, but for some reason I don't like their newer versions, ie d&d v3+, vampire: the requiem etc. Are there any others who have gone through the different versions? How do you feel about the most recent ones?
misuba 18y ago
Yes! The original WarCraft board game is way underrated - mostly because you have to download a patch (yes, for a board game) and because it doesn't come with fancy molded plastic pieces. It's much more for the hardcore tabletop gamer, though. (As is the StarCraft board game, which is quite different but also wonderful.)

thomaspaine 18y ago

I used to play this game all the time, but eventually just got tired of it. It became too predictable.

josh_nyc 18y ago

I was introduced to Catan during college and we quickly had a weekly game going. The interplay of luck and skill is intrinsically woven into the gameplay, which kept things very dynamic. The "wheeling/dealing" aspect of the bartering keeps things interesting when it isn't your turn. Just when things would get boring on the skills side (someone was far ahead of everyone else), luck would rush in to make things interesting. Just when things would get boring on the luck side (a series of bad rolls), there would be opportunities to strategize around it. I haven't played it in years, though (not near that group of people anymore), so it was a pleasure to see this pop up on HN. And it is pretty relevant insofar as the "programming" and game loop is quite clever. There are some great online versions too (asobrain, jsettlers, etc... would provide links but I don't know what the best online versions are today).

habibur 18y ago

You can't figure out, what game the article is talking about until you finish reading a lot of text. So here is the link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlers_of_Catan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlers_of_Catan It's called Settlers of Catan.

Flemlord 18y ago
And it's a great game. There's also a decent version you can download for XBox 360: http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/puzzle/catan/index.html http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/puzzle/catan/index.html

jcromartie 18y ago

And Puerto Rico is even better :)

syntactic 18y ago

Funny a friend just introduced this game to me a couple weeks ago, it is pretty fun and easy to learn buy in my opinion too short, more like a rush to get 10 points than a thorough strategy game. For the first few games, just when I had my little economy humming along somebody would bust out their ten victory points out of nowhere.

fbailey 18y ago

growing up in germany I lost a lot of my youth time to this game

msluyter 18y ago

Huge boardgame fan checking in. Settlers makes for a great "gateway game," a way to introduce non-gamers to the world of eurogames, but most hardcore gamers in my crowd find it a little too luck driven. We tend to prefer games like Agricola, Powergrid, Caylus, and El Grande these days. But I still think it's a pretty good game. If you're new to boardgames and like Settlers, I recommend going to BGG (boardgamegeek.com) and checking out their list of the top 20 or so games and trying some of those. If you're looking for people to play with, there are a number of active boardgame Meetups. You can also check out http://www.brettspielwelt.de/ http://www.brettspielwelt.de/, which is a German site with a lot of popular boardgames available for online play. Happy gaming!

misuba 18y ago

I agree with a lot of other commenters here that Catan is luck-driven and essentially over (except for a lot of tedious listening to people tell you _again_ that they don't have the resource cards you want) after you make your initial placements. What deserves more attention, though, are the ways in which "worse is better" applies here - the specific things about Catan that make hardcore gamers dislike it are, in many cases, the things that make it popular. For instance, lots of people like to feel that when they win, it's because they were skillful, and when they lose, it's only because they were unlucky. On the other hand, if you really _are_ investing your skills in your decisions but still lose due to luck, you'll be really frustrated. Catan does an excellent job of keeping players busy, but essentially on an equal footing of powerlessness. On this basis it really appeals to people who get all kinds of nervous when asked to play any kind of game of skill with friends.

blinks 18y ago
A better game for that group would be Fluxx (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/258 http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/258) -> lots of fun, interesting decisions, but a massive element of luck. In Fluxx, if you know what you're doing and get lucky, you can win extremely fast. If you don't get lucky, though, you're stuck. I've found that people interested in a light-weight game always end up liking it.
- icefox 18y ago
  Ugg, seems like everyone has a copy of fluxx and while it might take no time to teach or setup it is really not that good of a game unless you are seriously drunk.
- misuba 18y ago
  ...except that many non-gamers are really flummoxed by the way Fluxx's changing goals keep putting different demands on them. They feel like the rug's been pulled out from under them, when really all that's happening is they're playing a game that's all tactics and no strategy.
- jvdh 18y ago
  "if you know what you're doing and get lucky, you can win extremely fast." I would turn that around. The luck factor in Fluxx is staggeringly high. However, what makes Fluxx fun is that it does not make any attempt whatsoever to hide that fact. My problem with SoC is that it has a very high luck factor, but that the game also tries very hard to hide that fact. The expansion Cities and Knights or using a deck of cards with the dicerolls make SoC bearable.

falldowngoboom 18y ago

As others have said, I find Settlers to be all about the initial positioning of your pieces. Choose wrong and it's a slow grind to an inevitable defeat.

mapleoin 18y ago

The luck and strategy part is also very nicely done in http://www.wesnoth.org/ http://www.wesnoth.org/ which is inspired by Settlers of Catan and other such games. You might be repulsed by the graphics at first, but after a while you actually get to appreciate them and find that they fit in perfectly.

jibiki 18y ago
Wesnoth is nothing like Settlers, but it's still a good game, especially considering the price. IIRC, ESR wrote a campaign for it.
- mapleoin 18y ago
  yup, ESR is an active contributor. You can find him in #wesnoth@irc.freenode.net sometimes.

sanj 18y ago

If you're playing this game without the "Penny Rule", you're missing out. SoC suffers from a bit of a compound interest effect: a few bad (non-producing) rolls at the beginning can screw you for the entire game. To make up for this: Anytime there is a roll on which a given player doesn't get any resources (and not because of the thief), they are given a penny. During trading, a player can buy a resource from the bank using pennies for the cost of number of victory points showing. This dramatically reduces run-away-winner syndrome.

time_management 18y ago
That's a great design hack. Did you come up with it? If only someone could do something similar for mana drought/flood, Magic would be a pretty good game.
- sanj 18y ago
  I'm not the originator. But I am a convert!
  - time_management 18y ago
    It's nice. It reminds me of the "square root" hack for Gin Rummy, from the guy who came up with the card game Ambition. Square-root hack is as follows: regular rounds are scored on the square root (rounding down) of the deadwood difference, capped at 5 points. Undercuts get a bonus of 3, plus the square root of the differential. Gin scores 4 plus the square root of the opponent's deadwood. So the ranges are: Regular: 1-5 Undercut: 3-6 Gin: 5-13 The victory condition is to have win a round when you have at least 20 points, and you are in the lead. Second-turn Gin is extremely rare, but first- or second-turn knock is not rare. With the regular system, a second-turn knock (pure luck) can be a 60+ round, and that's more than half the game. With this system, it's only 5 points.
- freakball 18y ago
  Mulligans are built into tournament rules. That being said, I find that they are quite the leveler; high tempo decks with less lands suffer less than a control deck, but need mulligans more often. It's a trade-off, and evens out the playing field more than people realize.

kbrower 18y ago

Can someone please make this game into an iphone/ipod touch app already

icefox 18y ago
A lot of the fun of the game is playing with other people, taking and in general hanging out. I get together with a handful of people about once a month to play board games. We try to play one new game every time and then replay the good ones. Puerto Rico, Agricola, Power Grid, Ccitadels, etc. We any of the Boston hackers be interested in joining or starting a startup/hacker board game night?
- misuba 18y ago
  That said, though, I wonder why there aren't more "hot seat" style mobile games, designed to be played on one handset that gets passed around. Or on many handsets that share game info wirelessly but depend somehow on co-presence in the real world.
  - eru 18y ago
    I've played "Das verrückte Labyrinth" in this way with a friend on two Nintendo DS.

time_management 18y ago

Solid game, but not the best of the genre. Tigris and Euphrases FTW.

mcu 18y ago
Tigris is a much deeper game.

albertcardona 18y ago

It's one of the best board games I've ever played. And there is a java version called jsettlers with online ladders and so on, that helped a lot to spread word about Settlers. The java version was created to test artificial intelligence applications for robot players, with some success (although robots never beat a trained human). Settlers as a game pushes the player to discover different business strategies and to commit to them; in between strategies never win. And always to invest! Cards in the hand lose value very fast (and get taken away en masse with a 7, and by the robber as well). It's fascinating. Edit: some here mentioned the "Cities and Knights extension". I have never played the game without them -- even back in 2001, the board game you can buy on a shop already had Cities and Knights included. I didn't know it existed without them at all. Edit 2: the JSettlers applet: http://www.jsettlers.com/ http://www.jsettlers.com/

brunoqc 18y ago
We can also play for free on the official website : http://www.cms.playcatan.com/content/view/137/59/lang,en_US/ http://www.cms.playcatan.com/content/view/137/59/lang,en_US/ And there's also another open source version, Pioneers : http://pio.sourceforge.net/ http://pio.sourceforge.net/
- euccastro 18y ago
  There is a nice Java implementation and community at http://games.asobrain.com http://games.asobrain.com It's called "Xplorers" for copyright reasons.

Tichy 18y ago

It certainly has become the new Monopoly in Germany. I prefer Carcassonne, though, or at the very least, Settlers with the Cities and Knights expansion. Also the settlers of catan card game is very good in my opinion (I like it much better than the board game).

mechanical_fish 18y ago

Have I entered some sort of time warp? I was introduced to this game at the gaming club at Cornell. In 1997. When reading this article I had to keep looking up at the dateline to make sure I hadn't accidentally slipped back into graduate school. Talk about existential terror. The moral of this story is threefold. First: I was a much bigger game geek than I ever thought I was. Second: Your business can take a really long time to reach its full potential. Third: Just because something is old news to you doesn't mean that there aren't lots of people encountering it for the first time.

electromagnetic 18y ago
I was never a board game geek, but that might have been a side effect of growing up in the 90's. I had friends who I couldn't hang out with every day, because we lived so far apart. So I ended up being killer at early video games and for the most part I still am although I rarely play the first person shooters or the RTS games anymore due to time (and, for the FPS', interest) constraints. Yet even I knew what Catan is. Even my wife does, I told her about 3 months ago that the next time we waste money on a board game we're actually going to get one I like, so I pointed it out to her. So even for me that was a sort of bizarre 'deja vu' experience. Then again, I grew up in the UK so I suppose this game probably hit the market much bigger and much sooner than in the US. I guess an addendum to your second moral is that foreign markets can act in unexpected ways.
cos 18y ago
No, you're not alone. I've been playing Settlers for years, and it's long been a favorite of a number of friends of mine in different cities who don't all know each other. Perhaps it's been a niche game this whole time and will go "mainstream", but its niche hasn't been that obscure.
ken 18y ago
Not that this isn't some sort of time-warp article, but haven't you learned by now that Cornell has little in common with reality? We even put it on a bumper sticker. :-)

chris11 18y ago

Here is an unofficial online flash version of Settlers of Cataan. (Registration is required) http://games.asobrain.com/ http://games.asobrain.com/

mynameishere 18y ago

Come on. Nothing beats a good 40-hour marathon of Axis & Allies.

run4yourlives 18y ago
40 hours, and all that matters is whoever can hold the Caucasus for longer that 2-3 turns.

2bit 18y ago

I had no idea they were releasing a new PC version soon, that's great news. I'm hoping they introduce a tutorial mode. I've tried introducing friends to PlayCatan.com but having to explain all the rules in chat they lose interest right away.

joshu 18y ago

This is a new thing? I've hated this game for years.

wlievens 18y ago

If you want (as the article claims) a real Monpoly-how-it-should-be game, give Chinatown a try. http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/47 http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/47 It's about free-style trading much like Monopoly should be, except that it doesn't suck.