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 on a corner of a tile with the number they roll, they acquire cards corresponding to that resource which can later be spent on building roads, settlements, cities or "development cards", which either confer special abilities or simply provide extra points.
This randomisation means that no two games are alike, but there are enough rules in place to ensure that every game is fair assuming you can strategise appropriately. With the maximum of four players, for example, the board becomes somewhat crowded and it is easy for a settlement to become isolated, making the Longest Road bonus of two victory points rather difficult to attain, meaning players often have to adapt their strategies according to how many people are playing and whether their opponents are getting in their way or not!
The most unpredictable thing, however, is the Robber. The Robber rears his ugly head on the rolling of a 7, which is why no resource tiles have the number 7 assigned to them. The player who rolls 7 has the opportunity to move the Robber to a space of his choice. While the Robber is in attendance on a tile, it produces no resources, even if its number is rolled. Moreover, the player who moved the Robber can also steal one resource card from any player who has a settlement on the robbed tile. Finally, just to amplify the pain of this, any player who has more than seven cards in their hand at the time the Robber comes into play must immediately discard half of their hand, meaning a huge loss of resources for players who have been stockpiling!
Besides the randomised aspect, however, a key part of Catan is in interacting with other players. It is very rare for a player to become completely self-sufficient, particularly early in the game, and so trading resources with other players becomes a necessity for survival. Towards the end of the game as one player edges closer to the all-important ten points it becomes somewhat cutthroat, with losing players often colluding in order to harm the leader's chances of victory. Many of the "development cards", too, allow a player to move the Robber to a strategically advantageous space even when a 7 has not been rolled. Doing this three times also nets a player the Largest Army bonus of two points, so for many players it is a viable strategy to attempt to mess with the other players as much as possible!
Catan is one of the most-expanded games available at the moment with three major expansions currently available, plus a host of smaller ones. Cities and Knights adds more depth to the building side of the game, with additional resources to produce and the threat of barbarian attacks adding to the difficulties that the Robber already poses. Seafarers of Catan adds a large number of additional terrain tiles, including water tiles, which allows for much more flexibility in the game map and also the necessity of building shipping routes as well as roads. Finally, Traders and Barbarians collects together a number of smaller expansions that had been released over the years, adding more depth to many aspects of the game plus adding a selection of optional rules. The expansions are by no means necessary for enjoyment of the game (and also cost the same as the base game!) but they add some welcome variety to play.
Catan is regarded by many "serious" board gamers as a "gateway" game - that is, one which is an excellent game to introduce people to the hobby. It is certainly that - the rules are simple enough to learn quickly and not put off newcomers, but like many games there is a large amount of benefit in developing more advanced strategies. It also helps that the game is attractive to look at, with chunky, thick, well-illustrated cardboard tiles representing the island's terrain and solid painted wooden pieces denoting the players' settlements, roads and cities.
Catan is highly recommended for people looking for a game that will take players beyond the titles of their childhood such as Monopoly, Clue and Risk. It has considerable hidden depths, and the amount of player interaction makes it enormously entertaining to play. It can also be played online in a number of places, including the official Catan website and also on Xbox Live via an excellent computerised implementation by Big Huge Games, distributed via the Xbox Live Arcade service.