The Man Who Built Catan

I&#x27;ve got a little story as to how addictive Catan can be to some people...<p>About 15 years ago, a friend came to visit in my country with Catan. The simple, original box. He stayed at my place and for days my friend, my roommate and his girlfriend and me kept playing it. Then my friend left back to its country and took his Catan with him. We were so addicted and wanted to play really badly, but it was saturday evening.<p>Shops wouldn&#x27;t open until monday and we wanted to play. We had played the game so much in a few days, non-stop, that we knew it by heart.<p>So I told my roomate and his girlfriend: let&#x27;s build it. I was working in the book publishing business and had a very nice color printer at my apartment. I fired up Gimp on Linux (IIRC) and Quark XPress (that I&#x27;m sure of) on the old Mac and started designing basic hexagons and cards layout while my roommate started drawing and his girlfriend started writing down everything she remembered. Then we printed everything on the color laser printer and started cutting.<p>In about three hours (!!!) we had a functional game (we&#x27;d put a huge table glass on the map once randomly distributed). And we played the whole Saturday night, the whole Sunday... And when we woke up on Monday, we went to buy the game.<p>We were so into it that the three of us couldn&#x27;t wait 36 hours or so to buy the game: we had to have it immediately. And we built it.<p>There&#x27;s one word I&#x27;m thinking of for this game: addictive ^ ^

Catan was my first German-style board game[0].<p>I&#x27;ve since &quot;graduated&quot; on to more complicated games, so I rarely play it anymore, but I find that it&#x27;s an effective &quot;gateway&quot; German-style board game. Almost all of my friends who have played it love it, and have gone on to try (and enjoy) other German-style games. Catan is nice because it&#x27;s sufficiently more complex (and well-designed) than Monopoly so as to be interesting, but not so complex that the rules take ages for newcomers to learn (as is often the case with many more complicated games).<p>My personal favorite at the moment is Through the Ages[1], though I&#x27;m also a fan of Puerto Rico[2], as it&#x27;s a rare example of a good game that has (almost) <i>no</i> random elements to its gameplay, such as rolling dice or shuffling a deck. (There is <i>one</i> set of tiles that is shuffled, but it&#x27;s rather inconsequential and could easily be made deterministic if desired).<p>Here in NYC, there&#x27;s a cafe dedicated to board games and which was funded on Kickstarter[3]. As a huge board game geek, I&#x27;m really glad they&#x27;re catching on.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-style_board_game" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;German-style_board_game</a><p>[1] <a href="http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/25613/through-the-ages-a-story-of-civilization" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;boardgamegeek.com&#x2F;boardgame&#x2F;25613&#x2F;through-the-ages-a-...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3076/puerto-rico" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;boardgamegeek.com&#x2F;boardgame&#x2F;3076&#x2F;puerto-rico</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.uncommonsnyc.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uncommonsnyc.com&#x2F;</a>

&quot;The company originally sourced all of the materials for the game from Europe, but, when demand began to take off, the manufacturers didn’t have enough wood to keep up.&quot;<p>Couldn&#x27;t they have traded some grain or ore?

The great thing about Catan is how it&#x27;s a wedge. It&#x27;s a gateway drug into the world of modern boardgames (I don&#x27;t say Eurogames because there&#x27;s some fantastic Ameritrash). People who play Catan are then amicable to try out other fun great games like Ticket To Ride and Small World.

For those who might be interested:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3WJTlDa7oo" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=o3WJTlDa7oo</a><p>This is a Table Top episode hosted by Wil Wheaton playing Settlers of Catan. There is also another episode where they play the Star Trek variation.<p>Also, if you haven&#x27;t seen this series and are interested in board games I highly suggest you watch other episodes. The level of interest will vary from episode to episode based on whether you like the type of game they play. But they give you a decent idea of how the game works and how it is played.<p>I have made several board game purchases based on this show.

I never played Catan but wondered if it was suitable for kids 8-12 yrs old?<p>Also, anyone play &quot;Escape from Colditz&quot;? man I loved that game as a kid.

My friends and I just got into Catan and it&#x27;s really great. We used to play a ton of FIFA and Madden when we were together, now it&#x27;s always &quot;who wants to settle?&quot;. It really is a great game because it can&#x27;t be completely beaten like Monopoly can and there is no best strategy that we&#x27;ve found. I play totally differently than my friends and we all win sometimes.<p>I also love the social aspects of trading and the robber. We have a LOT of table talk when we play, and it&#x27;s hilarious to see what people will say to convince someone to put the robber on a spot they don&#x27;t own. Also the desperate trades we get into &quot;I&#x27;ll give 5 wool for a grain! 6 wool for a grain!&quot;. It&#x27;s really the best board game I have ever played by far.

Is Catan really Silicon Valley&#x27;s golf, like the article claims? I&#x27;d love to think so but I haven&#x27;t seen any deals cemented over a game of Catan. Anyone have any stories?

It looks like there is a fairly active IRC channel for modern boardgames called #boardgames on Freenode. <a href="http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=%23boardgames" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webchat.freenode.net&#x2F;?channels=%23boardgames</a><p><a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.boardgamegeek.com&#x2F;</a> is the IMDB of boardgames.

Here&#x27;s a fun (and pretty long) podcast interview with Klaus and Guido: <a href="http://jeffrubinjeffrubinshow.com/episode/16-settlers-of-catan-creator-klaus-teuber/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jeffrubinjeffrubinshow.com&#x2F;episode&#x2F;16-settlers-of-cat...</a>

Catan is incredible to me. We picked it up in a thrift shop in a rural eastern Washington town, thinking it was some relic of the 70s (this was probably 1998 or something). We played it on family vacations and never thought about it outside of them. Then, all of a sudden, it exploded in popularity. Really cool story.

Played it for the first time a year ago. I&#x27;ve been addicted ever since.

Best game ever.

I wish we had more of a board game culture in the U.S.<p>It seems that most adults end up, just because society is so demanding and competitive these days, with a lot of low-level social anxiety. It&#x27;s rarely enough that most people notice it, but it keeps people from really relating to each other or learning from each other, and it&#x27;s a major part of why people become so damn boring, one-sided, and narrowly careerist once they leave school.<p>There seem to be two antidotes to this low-grade but ubiquitous social anxiety. One is games, the other is alcohol. I don&#x27;t mind an occasional drink but, most of the time, I prefer the one that sharpens the brain over the one that dulls it.