The Settlers of Catan Board Game - discontinued by manufacturer

I first played this game in 2010 at a friends house and I loved it straight away. When I moved back home I knew I had to buy it and I wasn't disappointed.You begin the game by setting up the board, this part I always find the most interesting as as soon as I see the numbers placed on the terrain hexes I start thinking about where my first settlement placement will be.From the get go this is a strategic game, how you play in your first few moves could determine the outcome of the game. There are various ways to develop your strategy too. Initially it all comes down to placing your settlement and the possible outcome of resources from that. After that it divides as to whether you want to maximise your resources gained, to get the longest road (two extra victory points) or the largest army (two extra victory points).You can plan your strategy in advance but it is always changing. The person beside you could completely mess up your plan in one move and you must adapt and think how to still get what you want.You spend a lot of time thinking and planning during this game, it is really easy to get lost in. However you need to play with good friends, people who are not easily offended as a lot of humour and friendly arguments can manifest especially when placing the robber or trading. "I have two sheep to trade, does anyone have any wood for my sheep?", a completely innocent statement but of course it always gets laughs, sounds childish to some I guess but it can be really fun and funny.Due to how the game is set up and because quite a lot of it does rely on chance you never end up playing the same game twice. How the resources are spread out is always varied and you will find early on you have an over-abundance of some and lack of others but this changes game to game generally.Game time varies on the number of players, breaks and the time players take to make their decisions. I have found it to be roughly 1-1.5 hours for a short game and 2-4 hours for a long game. You never know who will win until the very end.I love strategy games and Settlers of Catan was one of those rare gem's that truly is great fun. (Not as many family arguments as monopoly!)Good Points : easy to learn/teach, family friendly, board set-up varied, strategic, engagingNegative Points : IMO needs a timer for some people trading :)

Settlers of Catan is an essential board game. It deserves a place on the shelf more than Monopoly, Cluedo or Scrabble and actually rivals most modern board games with it's simple but elegant design.Catan is about trading.The board is full of hexagons representing different types of resources. Each of these hexes has a number on it, which represents how often it will produce it's specific product. As a player you will build settlements and roads around the edges of these hexes, gaining you access to the goods that they provide. On each person's turn they will roll two dice and the number will correspond to one of the hexes, then everyone who has access to that hex will gain one of it's resources. But in order to build an expand, you will need resources that you won't have access to, meaning that you HAVE to trade with other people.What's so great about Catan is that it is so well balanced. However good your set-up is, you'll still need something that the other players have and they'll need something from you. This means that you often have to make decisions about how badly you want something and how much you're prepared to give your opponents. But the trades are almost always good natured and therefore make this a very social game.The only real danger is the robber. Anytime a person rolls a 7, they get to move the robber to any hex on the board - halting it's production, whilst also allowing the mover to take a card at random from an opponent on that hex. As 7 is statistically the most likely number to be rolled from two dice, you'll see him a lot, which means you might want to avoid making rivalries.Catan usually wraps up within an hour and is just as good 3 players as it is 4. It's a really easy game to learn and it's not too heavily themed, making it an ideal entry game for non-boardgamers or families with children. That said, I play this regularly with heavy boardgamers and we all still really enjoy it too.This is just a great game that's very easy to recommend. Simple, social and fun - there are also plenty of expansions that add multiple layers of complexity and depth, making this purchase a worthy investment. It's not too expensive either..

I like the game a lot. I also have 'Catan Junior' which lasted for a grand total of 30 days in my house as my daughter got bored with it as it was too straightforward.The slightly tedious point is that it takes around 15 mins to set-up. Otherwise, it is good time pass for nearly an hour.Don't worry about the fact that this is meant for 10+ years. My daughter is able to comfortably understand the game and play it fine. She needs to be explained from a scenario and what action to take for the first few times and then it is all good. The only drawback that I see for her playing is that she will not know the theory or reasons behind some of the moves but would be able to do them as a matter of observation or practice.

Anyone with any contact with board gaming culture has heard, by now, that we are in the midst of a Golden Age of board games. You may have heard this second-hand by now, or even via a New York Times style piece. And if you've heard that, you've also probably heard that this game is where the renaissance started. All this is basically true.Despite it's towering role in the recent history of the hobby, among serious gamers, it's fashionable to proclaim Settlers of Catan to be overrated, or a fun but shallow offering. Also, among American gamers, there is a rising contempt for the occasionally anodyne themes of Eurogames, and Settlers is practically synonymous with the style.Nevertheless, I feel that all these criticisms are misguided, and Settlers of Catan is a once-a-generation classic for a reason. For a number of reasons, actually, which I will outline for you here:1. BalanceSettlers of Catan is shockingly balanced for a game that relies so heavily on dice. The secret sauce of Catan - and this is going to come up again - is the social dimension. In any game of four players, the ability to gang up on a leader ends up flattening out a lot of the randomness.By the way, and this is a quick aside, Settlers of Catan should be played with four players. Fewer players throws off the balance and flow a little, and two is barely tenable. I've played with five and six players via the expansion, and it does as good a job as it could, but the truth is that four-player Catan is the way to go.2. AccessibilityPart of the appeal of Eurogames is that they are designed for a more family-oriented market. Settlers of Catan has extremely simple rules that can be explained to a child, or a tipsy uncle. There are no adult or controversial themes that could alienate any audience I can think of (dice haters?). Nobody is eliminated, and the balancing that comes with the social dimension can keep the race interesting until the final turn. Games are of a manageable length, and they don't interfere with more casual conversations between players and non-players.3. DepthI flatly disagree that Settlers is a shallow game. It is true that it's simple, but complexity and depth are not the same things at all. Despite this great simplicity, there are several different paths to winning the game, with a variety of overlapping strategies. Play benefits from careful planning, but requires constant adaptation. And again, the social element adds as many layers as you and your fellow players bring to the game.4. FunI've had a hard time finding a game that provokes the same kind of experience in players, hardcore or casual, young or old, whatever. The fact that it remains a horse race till the end, and so much of the game is trading and interacting, keeps it totally engaging for the duration. It succeeds at the rare accomplishment of actually facilitating human interaction between players. Very few of even the most lauded games in the hobby are able to promote the same kind of fun socializing, unless we're talking about actual party games (a genre which is probably underrated by many serious gamers, anyway).All that being said...Put together, these are the ingredients of a true classic. You could play it with parents and children at Thanksgiving, in a college dorm room, in the lunchroom in the right kind of corporate environment...to be honest, I've seen it played in all these places and more. You can learn it as a child and still enjoy it as an adult. It's balanced, nuanced, and painstakingly designed to be fun for everyone in the universe. It's a goddamn work of art, so bow down to Settlers of Catan!As for the rest of the usual stuff: attractive, durable and simple components. Very Euro. It can be tricky to get everything back in the tray after unboxing, but when isn't it? The rules could be organized a little better, but if you look for it, you can derive an unambiguous ruling for pretty much whatever happens. Only once did we have to resolve a debate by consulting the online consensus (I forget what it was about, but I think I was wrong).Any game collection is incomplete with it. For casual gamers, it should be a go-to for board game situations. For more devoted hobbyists, it simply needs to be studied and appreciated, and dusted off when you need to remember how good it is. It's the closest thing we've seen to chess in quite some time (I'm going to avoid hyperbole by refraining from specifying a time period, here).

Settlers of Catan, regalato ad amici inglesi è un gioco da tavolo dove si devono ricavare delle risorse per ampliare la proprià colonia su di un'isola. L'interazione tra giocatori non manca, anche fuori dal proprio turno. Consigliato anche per chi è ai primi passi nel mondo dei giochi da tavolo. Minimo 3 giocatori.

This game is the perfect game to use when introducing new players to board games. There is a little bit of English printed on some of the Development cards, but those can be explained to Japanese players. The player interaction is what really makes the game fun. In Japanese and in English!

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