Settlers of Catan

[Sarge85]

I love Avalon Hill board games - Axis and Allies, History of the World, Diplomancy(? )

I also like Risk, Chess, Sid Mier(sp) Civilization (1-4), Age of Empires ---

So I'm looking for a good board game along those lines, and have read alot about Settlers of Caan, but would like to read more than just a magazines review.

So tell me whats good and bad about this game.

Sarge[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img]

[xorbie]

[ QUOTE ]

So tell me whats good and bad about this game.

[/ QUOTE ]

At first when I played this game, I thought it was pretty lame. Since then, I've grown to think it's pretty awesome. There's a lot more strategy than first appears, mostly around ports/trading and also diversifying your numners (or not). There's also trying to road/settle early or trying to devo card and city your way to mucho resource production and trying to rely on just 3 settlements/cities for most of the game.

As for bad, the game really relies on having a bunch of players who all like the game, are into it and pretty even in skill. When we first started playing, a few of my friends were noticeably worse than others, and the game was mostly about which of the good ones could manipulate the poorer ones better (get very good trades, force bad players to soldier someone else, etc).

Also sometimes you end up with a situation where due to poor planning early on (and this can be as early as what settlments you choose), or due to a ridiculous variance situation with the dice (lots of 10s or something), the game ends up with one guy being way head, and then everyone just teams up on you...

Anyway, it's definitely a game that is one part strategy, one part manipulation, so make sure you get both parts down.

[Stephen H]

Bad: You can be out of the game fairly early on with bad play/bad luck, and you're never coming back. So you're playing a long game with no hope of winning.
Good: It's got high fun factor, even if you're losing. It's strategic, and xorbie's right, the manipulation factor is high. You will often be pointing out how bad your position is and how good someone else's is. Married couples have been known to have long arguments about this game (a friend of a friend calls it "The divorce game". They play it anyways.)
But it's fun. And there are a variety of winning strategies to play, and the roll of the die can determine the winner in a close race.

I recommend the Seafarers expansion, and I also recommend, after playing perhaps one or two scenarios to get used to the rules, to simply randomly lay out the board each game. There's really no reason to play with only a few preset layouts. The Cities and Knights expansion is fun, but extends the game, and isn't really necessary until you've logged a lot of hours into the regular game. I'll still play with or without the C&K expansion, but I don't want to play without Seafarers.

[hmkpoker]

I have lost six months of my life to this game. I am not kidding. We used to play it for hours in college, then had to abandon it as a scourge on humanity. It was heinously addictive.

SoC is a pretty simple game. The cool thing about it is that the board is randomly generated from hex tiles, so you have a different map every time you play. You build things that are worth points, and the first to get ten points wins.

The thing that I dislike about the game is that so much of the game is determined by the initial placements and rolls. If you place your initial two settlements poorly, or get "robbed" early in the game, you might as well forfeit (in fact, half the groups I've played with have a house rule against using the robber in the first couple turns because it just kills the game)

The strategy is all about politics. Since you are constantly trading resources, the secret to winning is being good at conning idiots who have no idea what they're doing out of their resources and building more cities. Playing it online is terrible; trading is really complicated and there's no interaction. It's pretty good though to play live.