I think that it is fair to begin this blog with an entry for the game which started it all for me. During the late eighties and aerly nineties I played some classic Avalon Hill games like Blackbeard or Advanced Civilization, but when my parents bought me a computer in 1992 I gave up with boardgames completly.
It was way back on early 2007 when I was spending Christmas in the wonderful city of Maastricht, in The Netherlands, when I first saw a copy of The Settlers of Catan. I was strolling there with my girl-friend and a friend of us. She was a nice dutch girl who loved boardgames. We steped in a small toy´s store and there I saw a full shelve filled with De Kolonisten van Cataan copies.
.- What´s that? - I asked
.- Oh, you don´t know that game? Really? - answered her
.- I had never seen it before, is it a boardgame? like Monopoly?
And then she smiled at me and explained how different from Monopoly that game was. In fact, we tried the game a bit later and I liked quite a lot. When I was back in Spain I bought a copy and I played it several times with my brother and sister in law. but then I started to find out about boardgaming and I discovered more complex games. The Catan box was first relegated to the back of my wardrobe and eventually I ended up selling the copy second hand. It was in late 2007 when I was playing games like Caylus, Agricola or Struggle of Empires, and since that day I did not play any other single game of Catan until just two weeks ago.
Two weeks ago a bunch of friends and I signed into the Nómada Player, a sort of competition amongs clubs from Madrid. The third game that was scheduled to be played (after Agricola and El Grande) was Catan. At that time I had even forgotten how to play the game correctly and in fact I made a trade of four sheeps for one brick that I needed desperatly, but instead of making this trade with the bank in the regular 4:1 trading rate I did it with another player... I was trololed in an unmercyful way, but I deserved it for not knowing properly the game´s rules.
Anyway I liked the game and since then I had downloaded the Iphone program which includes not only the base Catan game, but also the first two expansions: Cities & Knights and Seafarers. So far I enjoy Cities& Knights mainly, since I find it to be a good gamer´s game. Sure it has quite a lot of luck dependence but I am happy with the way the game evolves in a good time frame and with some room for tactics and screwage among players. I see Cities & Knights as the regular standard way to play Catan from now on, but I also admit that the core came The Settlers of Catanis a way better option for beginners.
Actually, and with the only exception of Ticket to Ride, Catan is the only entry game in my whole collection. It scales only with three or four players, since I find that the five and six players game, playable after purchasing an expansion, is quite tedious and prone to drag out quite a bit. I just love the game with three or four people, no less no more.
I have not tried the expansion Trader & Barbarians yet, the third one in the series. It has some special rules and variants but I guess I won´t play Catan so much so I won´t need it actually. In my gaming group and with only some exceptions, Catan is seen as a game for beginners with no room for tactics or strategics and the people in my gaming scene never, absolutely never propose it and probably most of them will turn down a game if I do so. I guess I will play Catan only with my family, my iphone and may be, every now and then, with a couple of guys of the group... but so far, I am very happy with this rediscovery of an old classic I had forgotten long time ago...
The Settlers of Catan
Catan: Seafarers
Catan: Cities & Knights
Catan: Traders & Barbarians