Settling Down with Catan
We have played a game of Settlers of Catan as a five person game…which is fairly different of a game. All players can do more actions each turn. This likely was introduced to keep people involved in the game, as turns can be dragged out as players make difficult decisions. I have played a decent bit online since then in three player games. I much much prefer both playing with fewer than 5 people as well as online (the board for Catan is a little cumbersome to setup).
- What are the main game mechanics?
- What makes this game fun / interesting? (Oh, so easy to answer)
- How would this work as a computer game?
Mechanics
There are four main actions players can take: a) buying buildings or cards, b) trading resources, c) placing buildings, and d) playing cards. Strategy involves selecting starting points for your settlements, pointing your roads in opportune directions, building up your roads & settlements / cities selectively, and trading resources at the right time for other resources (either with other players or the ports), collecting & playing cards at opportune times, and placing the robber token at choice places on the map when a “7″ is rolled.
Essentially, the game is fueled by the need to acquire and exchange (via trade or purchasing) resources. Whoever acquires the most amount of resources at the “right times” will generally win.
Why is this fun?
I have been putting off finishing this post because I have had a difficult time pinning down why Settlers is fun. I’ve played roughly 30 games online - I obviously enjoy it….but why? One striking aspect is that resource needs change over time. At the beginning of the game, players generally are going for building roads, settlements and possibly buying cards. After they have “enough,” they switch to building cities, buying cards, or going for the most soldiers / roads bonus. Different players can be in different stages of needs and therefore force changes in strategy. For example, if I am behind in building roads and settlements because I simply cannot get brick, I may try and focus on improving the settlements I do have and buying cards. There are, however, no explicit stages of the game (like Ra).
Settlers is very very goal-oriented - definitely designed for achiever-type players who like resource management and expanding territories (a la Risk or Civlization).
How does this relate to computer games?
Settlers already is a well-played game on Xbox 360 - it has a direct mapping to playing on a gaming console. It has direct analogies to other games in terms of resource management & territory expansion. I think that Settlers does make the notion of competing for resources a bit unique since players can a) trade resources with each other, which adds a value judgement of “how much is it worth for me to give an opponent something they need so I can obtain a resource I need?” and b) different players need different resources at different times of the game.
RTS games have a subset of this problem typically - as you get sexier buildings and units to produce, you generally need more of one resource or all of them….but this is rarely a different need than your opponents’ AND you typically have your own pool of resources. Similar to Settlers, you try to “get there first” to have access to the pools of resources that will benefit you most.
I can only assume that RTS games have kept the number of resources for producing units down (I don’t think there are any with even 4 different resources much left 5). This may be because there is simply too much cognitive load to handle more complicated schemes during the fast pace of play. Turn-based strategy games, however, do have something vaguely similar. When playing Civilization IV, you explicitly need certain resources to build certain units, and you can choose to bypass building those units and focus on other units if you can’t obtain that resource. The parallels between Civ IV and Settlers in this respect I think are pretty solid.