New Obsession - The Settlers of Catan

I’ve been playing a lot of Settlers of Catan lately. My brother was good enough to notice it on my wish list and find it for me as a birthday gift last month. My dad, sister, and Heather and I picked it up pretty quickly over the July 4th holiday and with good reason–it’s pretty easy to learn.

The game comes from Germany, and it looks unbelievably complex when you open up the box, but it turns out that it only takes one round of play to figure out that it’s not all that hard. This is, at its core, a game about resource management. It appeals to that corner of my brain that was obsessed with Warcraft II back in the day, mining gold and hacking away at the lumber in a race to build up my cities. (Note to self: play Warcraft II again soon) It’s also a game that holds your attention a lot better than, say, Monopoly, which can take forever to play. Even more importantly, unlike Monopoly, all players are interacting during each player’s turn. The element of trade and continuous resource generation makes the game A) extremely balanced and B) much more enjoyable when it’s “not your turn” (like I said, it’s never really not your turn).

Enough about the mechanics of the board game. The really exciting thing about Settlers is that Microsoft just made it available to play online via Xbox Live. So rather than pestering Heather to play one of the two-player variants or knocking on my neighbors’ doors, I can find a game within 60 seconds with three other human players, day or night. On the off chance that my internet is down (thanks, Comcast) or I don’t feel like interacting with real people, I can play against bots. This is about a thousand times better than just having the game in your closet and playing it (if you’re lucky) once a week when you can get your friends together. This is the ease of use and tremendous connectivity that Xbox Live gave hardcore gamers years ago, expanded to casual games.

Photo credit: Propagandalf