Settlers of Catan

Once you've mastered Ticket to Ride, and you're looking for a more player to player interactive experience, the next game for you is Settlers of Catan. Settlers of Catan is a game for 3-4 players, where they battle to develop the island nation of Catan. Turns include resource acquisition (via dice rolls), trading resources with other players, claiming tiles with roads and developments, upgrading those developments into cities or buying cards from a deck designed to help you in your efforts. The strategy to play is what you make it, changing with each game based upon other players moves as well as the set up changes of the board itself. Finally, this game is a great education tool for kids, as it teaches statistics of dice rolls (with an easy to follow dot mechanic) in addition to trade.

“Settlers has become so popular in Silicon Valley that it's now being used as an icebreaker at some business meetings.”
-Wall Street Journal

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Valeria Card Kingdoms

Valeria Card Kingdoms is a game I was fortunate enough to demo this year at Origins Game Convention in Columbus Ohio. It is a tableau building game (Similar to Machi Koro if you're familiar with that) in which you roll dice to gain resources from various citizen cards you aquire on your turns, that you will exchange for various other cards on your turn. To put it more simply, you get cards that give you stuff when certain numbers on a die are rolled. You then use that stuff to buy more cards to give you, you guessed it, even more stuff. Inflation tends to be a thing in this game as towards the end of the game everyone has alot of stuff, but the game does not disappoint in what you can do as a player to spend your stuff. You can slay monsters with might and magic that will earn you victory points (and stuff), you can buy citizens to get you more stuff from the dice being rolled, or you can buy domain cards for special powers and even more victory points (and stuff). Each play
Read more

Rattlebones

Another game I was introduced to this year is Rattlebones . It is a unique game for 2-4 players that incorporates customize-able dice that help you to move your set of meeples around the game board. The dice are six sided but have interchangeable faces on them. This allows the players to make their dice uniquely their own while you play. The dice themselves come with a tool to pop out the sides (be careful these pieces really can fly) and allow you to put a new piece into the dice face. These new pieces let you change out number faces as well as adding new (non number) faces that you pick up from moving your pieces around the board. The game play is a unique risk/reward system that incorporates a limited betting system and press your luck tactics, with their own interesting twists. There are many ways to change your dice and also many different ways to setup your board with different pieces to ensure lots of replay- ability, without the need to buy additional expansions. I'm
Read more

Hare and Tortoise (Remastered?)

We all know the tale of the Hare and Tortoise , well now we have another chance to play out their historic race. Rio Grande games has purchased the rights to a classic Ravensburger game "Hase und Igel" (Hare and porcupine as the German fable goes). The original game by Ravensburger won the first ever Spiel Des Jahres award for excellence in game design back in 1979, and with seemingly few tweaks to the original, Hare and Tortoise looks as good as the original, if not better. The game plays 2-6 racers with an interesting mechanic of needing to calculate how fast you should run to burn your fuel, (carrots) while still having some left to make it across the line. The game being a race, it helps to go fast like a hare; however, being the fabled race it is sometimes better to pace yourself like a tortoise. The racing mechanic is fairly straightforward and players will learn how they can move easily. The tricky part comes in when they need to manage moving forward to win the ra
Read more