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Blog Response #5
If none of you have have heard of the incredibly geeky game known as Settlers of Catan I suggest you put down your video game controller and race your bicycle over to your nearest comic book store and pick up a copy. Last year around Christmas time my brother sent me an email suggesting I get him this game for Christmas. I had endless material at my fingertips. Over the next few weeks I barraged him with a series of emails and voicemail messages making fun of him. On Christmas I played the game, and loved it. Yeah it took a while for him to explain the rules, and yeah it was sometimes hard to understand him because he kept having geek fits, but there were a lot of things to know. Eventually we began the game. You start off by setting up all these different tiles, which you come to learn are types of landscapes. There is rock, wool, brick, wheat, and wood. In the rules you find out that the settlers, you, will use these different resources to become the most powerful on the continent of Catan, hence the name. There are also ocean tiles that give the continent a boundary. Some ocean tiles even have little symbols on them, which basically tell you that that tile is a port at which you can trade some of your resources for others. The aspect of the game that captivated me the most was that the board was separated into tiles instead of one complete board. This aspect made for a different game every time it was played. True, there were the same rules, but when the tiles were randomly set up settlers would have to adjust their strategies and mode of attack. When settlers start the game they know that they eventually want to get 10 points. This is done by building settlements, cities, long stretches of road, large armies, and other buildings like chapels. As the game progresses though, they realize that the people they are competing against are also the ones that could potentially help them win the game. Other than using a port to trade their resources, they can trade with their opponents. One player may need wheat to build a city while another player may need wood to build a road. Players help each other and cripple each other throughout the game, an aspect that makes game play extremely addicting. Ultimately the object of the game is to become the most powerful, the one with the most settlements, the longest roads, and the one with the largest army. These things can be attained through a variety of methods and with the boards landscape differing from game to game, some of those methods are not always the easiest to carry out. This game is great fun for the whole family, but don’t take my word for it. - Cue Reading Rainbow theme -
