Introduction

If we’re going to build an “Essential Game Closet”, there is no better place to start than with Settlers of Catan, that lifetime-achievement German import game that, by my reckoning, started it all in 1995. In this post I will examine why Klaus Teuber’s enduring classic deserves the title of “masterpiece”, why it works for so many different play situations, and why the various “Catan” add-ons offer little improvement over the original.

 (Images from FunAgain.com – a very good place to buy new games)

The Original

The original game can be played by 2–4 players. It has a rather unique feature in that there is an initial “setup” phase, where the island is randomly assembled out of cardboard hex terrain tiles, and then players select their starting positions. This is followed by the actual “play” of the game. The setup phase takes maybe 15 minutes, and then the game play itself is typically between 30 and 60 minutes. But, ah, it’s not that simple! The selection of initial starting positions is the key to the game. Foremost, it requires you to assess the island to figure out what commodities are likely to be rare or not. Then you have to consult your gut and decide what kind of risk you want in your plans. There’s a clear statistical description of “expected” results that’s right there for everybody to see, but no single game is long enough to be statistically fair by itself, and it’s precisely these pockets of flukey dice results that turn the game on its head and make it fun.

Why It’s So Great

Settlers does so many things right, it’s almost astonishing. Consider the following propositions:

• The learning curve is shallow, the play time is short, and most beginners grasp the game and do fairly well right out of the gate. I still think there are few better games out there to “hook” a new person into the world of Euro games.
• And yet the game contains a richness of depth in play that makes it fun for even the most hard-core of gamers to play. That makes Settlers a “common ground” game that’s useful in all sorts of settings.
• The game has just the right amount – and kinds – of randomness. The tile layout in the beginning makes each game a different challenge, but not overwhelmingly so. You still go after it with the same strategies and tactics. Realizing how minor changes from one map to the next require different approaches for success is a learned art. But this is somewhat offset by the randomness of the 2d6 roll on each turn that drives the game. Like any good gambling game, knowing your fundamentals lets you win more often in the long run, but in any given game the dice can go a bit nuts and ruin you. Or – if you’re lucky enough to hang on – make your win a nail-biter rather than a blow-out.
• The game doesn’t use hard currency or victory points. Value is represented in the resource cards, but they are sure not easily fungible – one of the ongoing challenges of the game lies in converting resources to the right type to buy what you want. Similarly, there’s no pure victory points – VPs are intrinsic to your game board presence alone. Now, maybe these things don’t seem like a big deal to you. But compare to a game like Puerto Rico. “PR” has just as many game board components and abstractions as does Settlers, but still requires tokens for both money and VPs on top of it. This does add a layer of complexity (and play-time drag) that puts off beginning gamers – oh yes, I’ve seen it happen. Lots and lots of Euro games have you do all sorts of things that eventually get converted into permanent Victory Points. This approach is time-honored and thus inherently understood, but it’s certainly not as elegant as building victory conditions into the game proper. You don’t acquire victory points in Chess, or Risk, or Monopoly…
• The game is “coopetition”. This is actually a hard thing for non-hobby-gamers to grasp at first, that you need to trade with your “enemies” and race them to the finish. I’ve seen the mental grinding of the gears, the smoke come out the ears, the person who refuses to trade, and his inevitable end in last place! But the good news is it usually only takes one time to “get” that. It’s a social and fun game, which in the long run makes it more attractive to a wider audience.
• In just about all 2– and 3–player games, and quite a few 4–player games, all players remain “in it” right up until the very end. And yet there’s few “miracle” comebacks: you play out your strategy and you get to savor the rewards of it working out. There’s a handful of paths to victory that are well-balanced (buildings, roads, armies, cards, ports), and within any given game the numbers that are “hot” and “cold” change over the course of the game, good micro-statistics there, and with those changes often comes a change in player fortunes that gives life to a trailing position.
• The components are colorful, pretty, well-made, and fun to play with. Everyone loves making little sculptures out of their stock of pieces; everyone likes making sheep jokes and noises.
• You can be Zen about it. Once you’ve got some experience with it, it’s possible to play a very good and serious game while still being pleasant and social about it. That’s really a rarity from what I’ve seen.

Aside: A Bad House Rule

I’ve seen that some people have come up with the idea of using a deck of 36 cards, marked with the standard distribution of 2d6, as a way to reduce the dice randomness of the game. To me this just seems like an awful idea. Having never tried it, maybe I shouldn’t rush to judgement. But I think that if you’re not willing to enjoy the craziness of an uneven distribution on 2d6, then you’re missing one of the things that makes the game so much fun in the first place.

The Expansions

There have been three major expansion to the original Settlers game, these are add-ons that combine with the original game:

• The Seafarers of Catan (1997)
• The Settlers of Catan 5-6 Player Expansion (1999)
• The Cities and Knights of Catan (2000)

I have played all of these several times. My opinion is that they don’t improve on the original. Or at least, they change the quality of the game severely. If you really, really, love the whole Settlers thing and don’t like learning other new games, then maybe you like the idea of getting a bunch of different “looks” out of your Settlers rules and components. But for me – no. When the classic Settlers experience strikes you as stale, why not just play something else for awhile instead?

Here are my specific gripes:

• Seafarers is the best of the bunch. It makes the sheep more useful and adds a exploration element that gives new paths to victory. But in the long run it seems to makes for a longer game, and not one with enough new fun to justify it.
• The 5–6 player expansion is brutal. On the surface it seems like a charming idea – more people to share it the fun. But the games are more than twice as long, in my experience, and even worse: inevitably, at least 2 – usually more – players get stuck in losing positions relatively early and never recovery, making for a lot of whining and misery. If you’ve got 6 players, I suggest you just play two 3–player games at adjacent tables and crown the fastest game’s winner as the overall winner of the session. You’ll really have a lot more fun with it.
• Cities and Knights makes my head hurt. I’ve played it a dozen times; I get it; I just don’t like it. It’s an enormously complex re-imagining of the original game play, and once again, for all that added baggage, I seldom find the experience to be any more fun than straight up classic Settlers. Gameplay usually skews longer. And the new paths to victory are perhaps too deep – too often you don’t get far enough down any of them to really feel like you had a successful game!

The Spin-Offs

In addition to the core “Catan” games and add-ons, there are also many stand-alone games that use the “Catan” theme. That Klaus is no dummy! These are, for the most part, completely different games and rule systems from the original Settlers. A short list is as follows, and this excludes the German-only ones that haven’t yet found an American distributor and translation:

• The Settlers of Catan Card Game (1996)
• Starfarers of Catan (1999) – space race/exploration variant
• Starship Catan (2001) – a card game based on the “Starfarers” board game
• The Kids of Catan (2003)
• Elasund: The First City of Catan (2005)

I have, in fact, zero experience with these games! That’s just how it goes sometimes. Obviously Klaus is a very talented game designer, and so these other offerings may well have some good stuff going on. If they made it into my regular gamer group I’m sure I’d be willing to give them a try. But having said that – none of them are Settlers – they are just “other” games, competing with the hundreds of other out there, and needing to be judged on their own merits.

Conclusion

It’s hard to imagine that if you have a regular game group and you play some Euro games that you don’t have Settlers in your collection somewhere. If that’s the case, run out and get it now, without delay, there’s no excuse.

Similarly, if your gaming group typically plays other stuff – RPGs, card games, minis – and you’ve always wanted to sample the Euro game waters, Settlers is a can’t-miss proposition for you.

Finally, if you wanted to share some of your board gaming culture with “outsiders” - you know, friends and families - Settlers makes for a perfect demonstration of all that’s good about this hobby. And if it saves you from playing even one more game of Scattergories somewhere down the line, you’ve done something good. Giving Euro-games as holiday gifts to outsiders who may or may not want them initially can be a dicey proposition, but it’s great if you can pull it off!