Settlers of Catan [2002]

When a friend of mine first recommended that I try Settlers of Catan, I was somewhat dubious. I’d never played the original board game and, seeing the slightly dodgy graphics, I wondered why he was so insistent. Under some duress, I started to play, and at first I feared that my concerns were about to be justified.
I found Settlers of Catan to be quite hard to get in to. It took some time of playing before I could get the hang of the basic rules and (sometimes frustrating) interface.

However, as I started to play, I began to enjoy the experience and found that Settlers was not such a bad game after all.
The Settlers of Catan is a strategy game, in a way similar to the likes of the civ series. It involves the collection of a variety of resources; lumber, brick, sheep, ore and wheat. Using your collected resources, you build an empire - cities and settlements joined by your own road network. The similarity with the likes of the civ games is also mirrored in the hexadecimal playing board.
Rather than a pc game, it is clear that Settlers of Catan was developed from a physical board/card game – the board itself, rolling dice, ‘drawing from the deck’ and the points system for victory.
The thing that I enjoyed the most about the Settlers of Catan was that it felt like there was a great deal of strategy that could be employed by the individual player; you ask yourself ‘how am I going to play this?’ I found that my favourite strategy was to try and take advantage of a single resource, then use that to trade for the others. Maybe this says something about me, maybe not. I’m sure Freud would have something to say about it!
Part of the enjoyment of the game is that it is played on a randomly generated board. This means that each time you play, it gives a quite different experience, depending on the starting placement of your settlements and the positioning of the resources throughout the board. Another aspect of the Settlers of Catan that gives it an element of ‘randomness’ is the robber – a random piece that ‘steals’ a hex’s production/resource.
The overall winner of the game is the player who attains ten points quickest. You can win points in various ways; building settlements (one point) and cities (two points), building the longest road (2 points), or having the biggest army (again, two points).
In summary, I found Settlers of Catan quite hard to get in to, but if you persist, you’ll find a really enjoyable game.