Other things that can and have been traded in Settlers of Catan when I play with my friends:<p>Future production. Your next resource, next specific resource, all resources for next X rolls of the die, resources from a specific tile, or settlement/city.<p>Future rights. Right to trade at a certain rate in the future. Right to choose robber placement in future.<p>"Equity" in a settlement. Contribute resources to another player building a settlement in exchange for some fraction of the resources it will produce in the future.<p>And I'm sure as we keep playing more things will be added to this list.<p>For a slightly silly but still fun variant. Settlers with Nuclear Weapons!
<a href="http://albertsun.info/misc/nuclear-settlers.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://albertsun.info/misc/nuclear-settlers.pdf</a>
In golf there's a lot of downtime built in which gives you time to talk, build a relationship, etc.<p>If you try to do this over a board game you'll just hold up gameplay. And depending on the game it can be rude to have other conversations while someone is making a move.
Settlers isn't just last year, it's last century (1995). It did however spawn an entire new genre of boardgames with less emphasis on money and conquest, and more on game balance, allowing trailing players to catch up, and creating a variety of different strategies to win (TMTOWTDI).<p>I'm just back from the Dutch gaming convention, and picked up Powergrid and Pandemic - highly recommended. Other favorites are Race For The Galaxy and Agricola.
Settler's is great, but a lot of people will complain it leaves too much to chance. That's actually partly why it remains fun for beginners, and the law of averages usually works out for the experienced folks in the end anyway.<p>For those looking for a less random experience, there's Puerto Rico, which is almost entirely deterministic. Agricola showed up on the scene recently and everyone's been raving about it.
Golf always seemed to me as a way to do networking. If you go alone you are usually grouped with 3 others for foursome groups which gives you a chance to meet other people. If you go to the right courses you stand a good chance of making useful connections that you may not have been able to get otherwise. Settlers seems like a great board game but I don't see it as a networking tool the way golf or other competition card games can be like poker. Unless we start hearing that business deals are formed over a game of Settlers I don't see it as taking the place in business that golf currently holds.
I was at a geek gathering once where another person observed that the startup people were all playing poker (bluffing, gambling), and employees of the big companies were playing Settlers (resource management, slow and steady gains).<p>Anyway, "X is the new Y" articles are always garbage.
Whatever happened to Hearts? During the dot-com boom, developers would gather and play Hearts at lunch. When I was interviewing back then, over and over again I'd get asked, "oh, and do you play hearts?" Ended up working for a company where we played everyday.
I love this game, in 2 player games with my wife, I think it's about 18-2 to her, I'm not so good at the strategy!<p>The only bad thing is when in a 4 player game, depending on your placement of settlements and what happens right at the start of the game with road building, you can immediately find youself in for a very hard long slog and be stuck on 3-4 points knowing that you have no realistic chance of winning and are just waiting for one of the other players to get 10 points.<p>3 players is the optimum I find.
That game is like Euchre. It seems like it has a lot of strategy, but then you get into it and learn that optimum play is fairly simple. With a group of experienced players it's mainly just die rolling.<p>I greatly prefer Dominion.
Wait... I thought that cycling was the new golf in Silicon Valley. Something about how it's easier for good cyclists to accommodate not-so-good cyclists than it is for good golfers to not completely upstage bad golfers.<p>Cycling is great for doing business. Pretty much everybody around there has a bike. The roads and trails around there are amazing. It's easy enough to carry on a conversation if you take a relaxed pace. Also, the weekend warriors get to show off their $3000 carbon-fiber rides that have only 150 miles on them. (Sort of like gearheads in golf, in a way.)
Another fantastic social/trading game is the card game Bohnanza. I prefer it to Catan because Catan feels too chance-driven:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohnanza" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohnanza</a><p>The briefest explanation is you have a randomly drawn hand that you can see <i>but not rearrange</i>, so you try to enact trades/changes that support your future cards.
If it is available in the US: try the Settlers of Catan card game. It is actually much better than the board game, but it is for 2 players only.<p>Personally I prefer Carcassonne to Catan.<p>The Catan <i>Dice</i> game is actually also pretty funny. A clever variation of another famous game principle that does not require too much thinking. I like how they milk the trademark but still come up with quality ideas.
Man, Settlers. I remember playing until 4 a.m. during a trip to Vegas once (don't ask). Kept on losing because of my reputation, of all things - after two wins, everybody got paranoid about making deals with me.
I love that game!! It's a perfect amount of strategy, but not so much that it is not a relaxing diversion.<p>Another fun game in the same genre is Stone Age.