You can also choose to offload a trade to the bank at an extortionate ‘four of one resource for one of another’ exchange rate. Or they will haggle, or counter propose, or offer you a different deal. Someone will agree, or not, to your offered deal. I’m just – look, I’m just processing some powerful feelings here. That is to say, a tediously unfunny joke that will make some people smile politely and the rest want to kill you. Everyone will stare at you because this is the board-gaming equivalent of telling everyone you used to be an adventurer until you took an arrow to the knee. ‘Does anyone have wood for my sheep?’, you’ll ask. You can also attempt to broker a trade deal. On your turn, you can spend your resources to solidify your claim of dominion over the island. The robber is a dick, and he’ll make you a dick too Sorry, I’m letting my personal feelings get in the way again. The robber is a dick, but not as much of a dick as the dick that uses him to dick you. While the robber occupies a tile, it won’t pay out. The player that rolled the robber gets to move him to a tile and then select someone with an adjacent settlement from which to steal a resource. If you roll a seven, you activate the robber – anyone with eight or more resources stockpiled loses half of their surplus. If you have a city bordering a tile, you get two of the resource instead of one. What each is trying to do is find the statistical sweet-spot for their two settlements that will generate the largest return on their placement.Įvery turn, the player rolls two dice and the resources that match that number pay out to any settlement bordering the tile. Each player begins by placing one settlement in player order, and then another settlement in reverse player order. Sheep are used for settlements and developments. Wheat and stone are used for cities and developments.
Wood and bricks are used for roads and settlements. There are five kinds of resources in Catan, used in different quantities for different things. So, while Catan comes out of this review reasonably well just remember that if you try to make me play it I will interpret that as an act of assault and report it to the authorities.
Looking at it from a slightly more detached perspective though I can easily see a game that other people can meaningfully enjoy. That’s my own personal view – I simply don’t enjoy the game. On BGG I rate it as three out of ten, ‘Bad, likely won’t play this again’. We don’t mirror that scale here on Meeple Like Us, but it does give us a bit of wiggle room when it comes to interpreting the rating we’ve given. Ten is ‘Outstanding, will always enjoy playing’. It would be a dereliction of my largely imagined duty to ignore it any longer.īoardgame Geek makes use of a ten point system for people rating their games. It’s an important game to cover then even if on balance I’d prefer to not make the effort. While I wouldn’t go out of my way to start anyone off in this hobby with a game of Catan, it’s also the kind of thing people might very well stumble into on their own. Catan is a big deal, and its omission until now has gnawed at me somewhat.
Catan robber full#
I’ve tried it and I’m not a fan, but don’t let me dissuade you from experimenting’.Ĭatan joins one of a handful of games we’ve covered on Meeple Like Us where I bought it – knowing full well I don’t enjoy it – purely to discuss it on the blog. It’s a bit like someone nursing a gut-wound and saying ‘Look, I appreciate this isn’t going to appeal to everyone but maybe you should see for yourself if you like being shot in the stomach. In this review then I’m going to attempt to walk a tricky line between explaining why I will only play Catan under duress, and also why you should be willing to give it a go yourself. It’s just… you’d need to put a gun to my head to get me to play it, and you’d need to pull the trigger if you wanted to stop me hating you for it. Catan is, for a geekier group of people, the Monopoly of modern board gaming.Īnd it’s good – it really is, even for its age it’s hard to look at Catan as anything other than a well designed game. Your slightly nerdier friends however might ask, ‘what, like Settlers of Catan?’. If you say to most normal people that you are a board-gamer, they’ll look slightly quizzical and vaguely alarmed as they ask ‘What, like Monopoly?’. On the one hand Catan is a well-designed title beloved by millions – one of the few modern designer board-games that can claim genuine fame outside of an ultra-niche demographic of ultra-niche nerds.
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