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Board game time with the family was, when I was a child, something of a treat. It was an opportunity for the whole family to get together and spend some quality time at each other's throats in the spirit of friendly competition. The rattle and roll of the dice on the table, the satisfying plastic "click" of moving one of Sorry!'s plastic pawns into place (only to be, inevitably, landed on by someone else causing one to be sent back to the beginning) and the fact that Monopoly and Game of Life's money looked a little bit like real money.

At the time, in my childish eyes, games with boards where you followed a set track around, rolled dice and could occasionally screw over the other players through blind luck were where it was at. The more plastic novelties the game revolved around, the better, with The Bigfoot Game (featuring its giant plastic mountain and Bigfoot kicking boulders down at you) being a particular highlight. If you had thrown a game with hexagonal spaces in front of me at the time - moreover, one where you didn't move a pawn around - I wouldn't have had a clue what to do.

Now, though, a number of years later my friends and I are enjoying something of a board game renaissance, and Settlers of Catan is one of the games that brought us back to the "adult" version of the hobby. Catan involves everything that I would have found indecipherable as a child and yet is all the better for being at the same time more strategic and less predictable than a "linear path" game.

Players take the role of a community of settlers on the virgin island of Catan. The aim is to become the most successful community by acquiring ten Victory Points. These points are acquired by building new settlements, upgrading them into cities, having the longest continuous road on the island and having the largest army. It's a simple idea that has been done many times before and since, but Catan's execution of the theme is straightforward and elegant with just enough unpredictability to make the game almost infinitely replayable.

The game board is randomly generated by drawing hexagonal "terrain" tiles and laying them out in a hexagonal formation. Terrain can be one of several types - forest tiles produce wood resources, plains tiles produce sheep, hills produce clay for brickmaking, mountains produce ore and grain fields produce, oddly enough, grain. Each tile then has a number assigned to it between 2 and 12, excluding 7. Each turn, players roll a pair of dice and, if they have a settlement

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