25 years ago, Catan became an American hit by beating Monopoly at its own cruel game
Games Features What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Although there are as many kinds of board games as there are meeples, dice, cards, etc., two major philosophies tend to hold sway over the hobby: American board games typically push players into direct, winner-take-all conflict that involves plenty of luck, while European-style games (Eurogames for short) focus more on cooperation—or at least less-directly hostile mechanics—with each player trying to craft a winning strategy that doesn’t necessarily require destroying their opponents. Those two seemingly disparate philosophies came together with hobby-shifting force in 1995 with Settlers Of Catan, now fresh off its 25th anniversary (complete with a shiny new anniversary edition). Catan, as it’s now titled, became the first crossover hit to bring Eurogaming styles to the U.S. But while the game has the same focus on resource gathering and lack of player elimination found in most Eurogames, its cutthroat dealings often end up just as brutal as that quintessential American board game: Monopoly.
For the unfamiliar: Players in Catan compete over land represented by hexagonal tiles laid out randomly on an island map, placing settlements in areas they control and roads to provide routes to expand to other nearby territory. Each hex produces a resource, such as brick or lumber, that can be used to build or upgrade structures and collect special cards that provide various benefits or points at the end of the game. Like turning houses into hotels in Monopoly, converting settlements into cities involves swapping out game pieces to provide a clear visual representation of whose property is the most lucrative.
Where Catan diverges from Monopoly, though (and where it cunningly twists its Eurogaming roots), is in how much power it gives players to get in the way of those lucrative moves. In Monopoly, you can see that another player is close to collecting a monopoly, but you’re not able to do anything about unless the dice land you on the right tile. In Catan, the roll of dice determines how many resources each player gains, but the increased control over how to spend those profits means you can always choose to screw your neighbor by cutting off their progress. Make a mistake early on that another player seizes upon, and you can wind up trapped in a small corner of the map with no way to expand, likely to forever remain behind in points. Essentially, Catan’s genius was in employing Eurogame mechanics in favor of a very American board game spirit.
Meanwhile, the luck involved in both games means it can be hard to get everything you want unless you can persuade your fellow players to help you—but even here, Catan’s resource-based gameplay allows far more nuance in how to be cutthroat than a simple swapping of properties. Need some ore and have plenty of sheep? You can try to offer a trade, but if other players think that’s more likely to help you than them, they can decline and force you to trade in your resources to the bank at a terrible rate of four to one. There are squares you can control to make that ratio better, but those face heavy competition from other players who also want to be masters of their own economic destiny.
Even if you try to play Catan as peacefully as possible, the game forces you into regular conflict via its Robber mechanic. Whenever someone rolls a 7, every player who’s managed to accumulate a hand of more than seven resource cards must discard half of them, and the active player gets to choose someone to steal a resource from while also rendering one of game’s tiles inert until a 7 is rolled again. (Monopoly might be mean, but it never forces players into attacking each other.) Unless you know someone has a resource you need, the Robber tends to be a way to mess with whoever’s in the lead, or just an opportunity to choose a tile that will hurt as many of your opponents as possible.
The game’s new 25th Anniversary Edition attempts to smooth over some of its most hostile edges by including the 2013 Helpers Of Catan expansion. Players can recruit various helpers that can do things like force other players to trade with them at a one-to-one rate or let you shoo the robber off your tile so you can start gathering resources again. Like playing Monopoly with a Free Parking jackpot, these cards don’t transform the game, but they do make it a little gentler.
There’s a lot to unpack about why Europeans and Americans have such different philosophies when it comes to gaming, but Catan helped push American players to broaden their horizons by meeting them on familiar ground. It also helps that even though most Americans have played Monopoly, few people seem to actually like it. “Monopoly but a little more strategic, shorter, and less cruel (sometimes)” is a pretty good pitch for someone looking to branch out from the subpar games they were raised on, and into Catan’s more robust mechanics that have served as a gateway for so many.
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So I’ve sunk a lot of time into Picross S4, another big collection of Picross puzzles. I’ve already done all the normal ones, now I’m trying to wrap my head around Mega Picross where some rows and columns are double-wide and have numbers indicating that the squares should form a 2-D pattern (i.e. not just a line.) Have reached a point where I’ll inevitably stall out on a puzzle and have to restart it because I have no idea where I screwed up. Also gone back to Jedi: Fallen Order for a bit and it’s a mixed bag. A thing that’s a problem for me is that while it’s a Metroidvania and the idea is you’re supposed to look around and find things, the game starts leading you by the nose and telling you to go to certain planets, and while you normally can delay that there is actually a point where you get ambushed and have to go through a whole prison/arena section. And as soon as you get out of that, they say “Oh, hey, here’s a message from Kashyyk, better go there!” Like I know it’s not an open world game but I’d like to be left to my own devices a little more. It’s still fun but I get the feeling they wanted it to be an exploratory platformer but also a big cinematic story because Star Wars. (Also there are a lot of tech glitches. Maybe it runs smoother on PC but by the same token they had to know what the PS4 was capable of by now.)Similarly I’ve decided to take a look at Star Wars: Squadrons. I’ve only played the first few missions but it handles pretty well, I’ve yet to play the old X-Wing or TIE Fighter games in any depth but this has decent flight/combat without being too demanding a simulation. I don’t know how much there is to the single player game and I fear the worst for online multiplayer (I get the feeling they’ll actually want you to work in teams and that never ends well), but I’ll see how much there is. What’s there so far is fun.
Is Fallen Order’s gameplay any different from the old Jedi Knight games ?
Quite a bit, I’d say- you never use anything but the Lightsaber (whereas in Outcast there are actually parts where you want to use something different), there’s a big emphasis on blocking and staggering opponents. And saves are limited to when you can get to specific points, which works like the bonfires in Dark Souls- you can rest there but it respawns the enemies, etc. The platforming is also more involved, you have a wall running ability and you can unlock various Force powers which are useful for travel as well as in combat.
We played Monopoly when we were kids, which I was terrible at. Banker rules, and also cheats constantly, and that was my eldest brother. We also played RISK, which ended almost every time with a complex set of family alliances failing in tantrum and red cordial as the loser threw the board and all of the pieces to the ground. My brothers could be depended on going North America, South America, and Europe, then fighting it out, whereas I’d ambitiously go for Asia, but as the too trusting player would usually be pushed back to my final defence in Australia. Sister was the most versatile player and usually the decider, but also tended towards betraying one or the other teams, the female prerogative.
I bought my family a copy of Settlers of Catan and the add-on for Christmas and they left it unwrapped in the shrinkwrap. We never played. As these things go, a miss. but I do love boardgames.
Putting money on Free Parking makes Monopoly worse by dragging it out, much as forgoing the auction mechanic does. Common mistakes like that are at least partially responsible for Monopoly’s bad reputation :PThis weekend I’ll probably be mostly playing Grim Dawn, which I picked up a while ago but only started the other day. After Torchlight 2 left me cold, I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy another Diablo-clone, but the punchy sound design and ragdoll physics make the game-feel far more satisfying (much as they did for the same studio’s Titan Quest).If I do manage to nab the TV, I might put some more time into Crash 4, wherein I’m slowly chipping away at story progress as I spend more time replaying levels for the costumes. That they resisted the temptation to put the costumes behind microtransactions was a pleasant surprise, especially after CTR’s cosmetics.
Staggering how many people don’t know the actual rules of Monopoly.
It’s weird how dumb, inconsequential things like that have parallels to bigger issues. People who hate a game without knowing how to play it properly are like people with hot takes on political issues they don’t understand.People who don’t mind lootboxes because they never feel tempted to buy them are like people who don’t wear a mask because they aren’t worried about Covid.The slow normalisation of online DRM and subscription services is similar to the creeping resurgence of fascism, in that they’re both Overton movements.And all these things are shocking when you realise how endemic they are: a lot of people, normal people, think that way.
If it helps, I know how to play Monopoly properly and still think it’s a bit shit. There’s far better board games out there.
That sounded like an informed opinion. What’s THIS guy doing in here?!
Hey pal, this is the KinjaAV Club! What’d you come to this room for an argument?
Here’s a small list of reasons why monopoly sucks:1. Games take too long. I’m guessing less than 1% of Monopoly games started are finished.2. Players get eliminated early. In a game that can take hours, having a player eliminated within the first 30 minutes is evening wrecking.3. The player makes very few decisions. It’s roll and move and you don’t get to split the dice up or move in a different direction. It’s buy or don’t (but usually buy) and once all the properties are bought, it’s buy houses or mortgage properties. That’s it. You are better off in jail during the end-game. 4. It’s a bland theme, with a ridiculously complex money system (7 denominations!). Monopoly isn’t just like a popular thing that hipsters take shots at because it’s cool. It’s a legitimately terrible game.Catan fixes every one of these problems.
I grew up in a family in which our parents taught the rules to the games and we never knew they were house rules because the instructions had been lost. The primary games of my youth were a Monopoly that required completing an entire pass of the board before buying properties not put up for auction (not to mention taxes going into the center of the board to be collected on Free Parking) and a non-scored Uno in which a Draw 2 could be effectively dodged by simply playing your own atop it to send it to the next player. I had no reason to question until I met families with arguably worse house rules, like Draw 2 and Draw 4 cards could be stacked to create horrific deck-sized draws for players.
Our family had a wild house rule that I believe actually sped the game up. We started with more starting cash (I can’t recall the exact figure), then we shuffled all the property deeds and dealt them out like playing cards. Each player had the option to buy the properties in their hand right away. Any property not bought up this way was up for grabs in the usual manner of landing on the space. Then the game started in earnest. It is still very luck-based, just much faster.We also used Free Parking and didn’t do auctions. I suspect the latter was because my mom really enjoyed setting up deals. There was always a lot of table talk and nebulous quid pro quo schemes (“If you sell me this now for a good price, I swear I’ll give you a deal on something you want in the future”).
The “No buying property until you complete an entire pass of the board” is the BEST rule mod you can use.
Yes and no. If someone rolls better, that just gives them a headstart on things. If it’s about the money, then just start with $200 more. Just take the race out of it.
families with arguably worse house rules, like Draw 2 and Draw 4 cards could be stacked to create horrific deck-sized draws for players.Wait – WHAT?Those are the rules I’ve always been made to play?!
Yeah, it has to be the American-style game with the most house rules happening.
Monopoly is a better game if you play by the actual rules, but it’s still a bad game.
Also the game is basically a bastardization of a variant ruleset for a board game called The Landlord’s Game that was meant to be a critique on capitalism.
Yep, though I’m not sure that really has a bearing on its quality given how many classic games started out as Half Life mods 😛
I have a cheater’s edition of monopoly where stealing is legal as long as you don’t get caught and you can do secret trades with people. It speeds up the game surprisingly well. Also if you get caught you go to jail and get put in plastic handcuffs attached to the board.
Putting money on Free Parking makes Monopoly worse by dragging it out, much as forgoing the auction mechanic does. Common mistakes like that are at least partially responsible for Monopoly’s bad reputationI was going to make exactly this point. I think the Free Parking and no-auction house rules caught on at a time when people had limited entertainment options and therefore were happy to play a board game for several hours. The game then retained those rules, (and hence its reputation as an endurance challenge) because of cultural inertia and subsequently crashed headlong into the digital age.
There are a lot of board games that are not any more based on luck than European games. Most still involve conflict and winner take all outcomes, but not all. Avalon Hill had (has) many games like these. As an example of one that was more Euro style, I would say the original board game of Civilization (which has nothing to do with the computer game).
I haven’t played tabletop games in ages, because most of them require non-dead friends (maybe I should try out Hasbro’s Ouija, I hear it’s more inclusive). I’ve very recently discovered Clue/Cluedo through a digital version with AI, it amused me for a while. I’m happy to see that Fury of Dracula has been digitalized as well, though less successfully so it seems (and I preferred the material version’s look and design). Hey, long ago I had even found a computer version of Cry Havok. I should try to find it again.In the meantime, because KSP2 is still two years away, I’ve restarted a Kerbal Space Program career, with a specific goal : landing on the mun the apollo way. That is, even though the Kerbin system is smaller than ours, forcing myself to build a four-stage rocket with a two-parts lander that requires to be picked up by the pivoting tip of the rocket, etc. Trying to mimic as closely as possible the complicated procedures of Nasa’s landings, even though the Mun doesn’t require anything that fancy, and such uselessly tall rockets tend to be a bit wobbly in that game.So I first gathered the required tech by quickly farming science through manned flybys of each planet. Then built a rocket as close to a saturn 5 as possible (or, let’s say, reasonably convenient), discovering the relatively new fairing parts. I hadn’t played KSP for so long, it was full of such good surprises. This new Delta-V counter helped a lot. I had to re-learn orbital docking from the internet (didn’t realize that selecting a target changed the referential of the navball), and a little trial and error brought the rest back. I almost lost two astronauts after a careless voyage to Eeloo, which required two or three gravity assist on the way back (re-learning the hard way at which speeds kerbal re-entry is even thinkable). And a first munar landing failed horribly simply because of a lateral drift tipping the lander, which I destroyed when trying to takeoff nonetheless.But it took a couple of days before experiencing the apollo maneuvers in KSP. And that was sweet and crazy. So convoluted, because so horribly tight combustible-wise (Aldrin and Armstrong landed with seconds to spare). KSP is a generous, forgiving pseudo-simulation, sparing us many horrible constraints such as the angle of atmospheric reentry, etc. I did the mission with safe reserves of propellant, my orbital rendez-vous took ages, it was really a childish reenactment. But still, it gives a vague start of an idea of the actual achievements of late 1960’s early 1970’s. I assume that the planned mid-2020’s landings will be more straightforward.
Anyway, made it. Don’t let the Flat Kerbin Society tell you otherwise.
25 years of giggling about having wood for sheeps. Anyways this weekend I’m finishing BOTW finally. I’m running it with CEMU on my gaming PC and that game in 1440 running at 144 fps is a really sight. It’s kinda silly that it’s the first game I dedicated to play since I built my new rig but I built this new beast for Cyberpunk 2077 and it got delayed so I had time to try something else first and the last time I tried BOTW emulated on my last PC it was an awful experience.
I have a feeling I may be the only player in boardgaming history to declare “wood for sheep” without realizing the double entendre embedded in that offer.
That’s because to you, it is single entendre. You just really like their woolly bodies.
There’s some comments above talking about how nobody actually plays Monopoly the way the rules dictate, which ends up making it a worse game. But how many people play Catan the way the rules dictate, i.e. only 1-to-1 trades are allowable? Maybe they changed the rules since I started, but IIRC the game says you can’t exceed that number in a trade. At the opposite end, our house rules not only allow 2 or 3 for 1 trades, but basically any trade you can think of that someone would agree to. For instance, I’ve had trades like “I’ll buy the first round in exchange for a Wheat and an element of my choice later on,” or a Resource card (chosen at random) for two Ore and a promise that the Robber won’t be put on any of my tiles. Bribery is not just allowed but encouraged, counting cards is a must, and it’s basically impossible to win without making cutthroat deals
As far as I know, the official rules make it clear that you can’t bind anyone to future trades but don’t place any conditions on current trading ratios. It’s actually why some of my gaming friends and I have always considered Catan a fundamentally broken game—because the opening-ended trading makes it incredibly easy to throw the game if you don’t care about winning yourself. So if you want, say, for your significant other to win, or for someone to beat the player who shut you out of contention, you can always give them twelve sheep for one wheat or whatever and massively tip the game in their favor.
Isn’t that true of almost any game? Are there games that specify that you can’t deliberately lose?
It’s not so much that you can choose to lose, but that in doing so you can use a straightforward game mechanic to confer a huge advantage on the other player of your choice. Like, you can lose at Monopoly on purpose, but you can’t just give another player all your Monopoly money.
That’s a problem with the people you played with, not the game. Is there any game that can’t be undermined by people cooperating when they’re supposed to be competing?I don’t even remember if it’s the official rules or house rules, but the way we play, all trades are x resource cards for x resource cards. A player who doesn’t care about winning can certainly undermine the game under those rules as well by always accepting trades with a friend and always denying them to an enemy.But I don’t think any of us has ever done that, it’s just agreed that one is supposed to play to win. The closest we’ve come to what you’re describing is when someone (never me) uses the robber for vengeance, and one occasion when a new player placed the robber back in the desert hex out of a deeply misguided pacifism that makes me very wary of ever playing with her again.We’re so competitive that we used to hide any development cards we hadn’t used until we read the rulebook again and found out we’re not supposed to. We’d never do the sort of thing you described even if it was permitted.
The lack of binding tbh is what makes the game interesting. I have a great fondness in my heart for rules that allow cheating, with the understanding that there will be blowbackAlso, I can see how you might consider it fundamentally broken, but out of the pool of 10 or so people that we play with regularly, all of them are competitive to the point that they would never throw. Even down 7 points, none of us would ever make it easier for someone else. “From hell’s heart I stab at thee” is the phrase we all live by
Before starting his first ever game of Catan, a friend said, “I have two questions…Can you form alliances?And can you break them?”
The only dark side of Catan that I have noticed, especially when perusing the board game sub of Reddit, is that some people (and I’m not saying your friends, but it kind of sounds like your friends) take board games way too fucking seriously, and shouldn’t be allowed within 50 meters of them.
No, definitely my friends. Apparently the Catan rules used to have some flavor text about how the person with the most victory points is the winner, and the other players must hail the new Lord of Catan! One gaming couple I know would demand that the losing players literally shout “All hail the new Lord of Catan!” at the end of every game, becoming especially insistent when someone else was butt-hurt about losing.(Though it’s not as egregious an example of rule-grubbing as the other couple I knew who would hold players to a joke in the rules of the game Munchkin about giving people a reasonable amount of time to respond to a card. The rules are like, “Be sure to give other players two and a half seconds to respond,” and they would actually count “One, two, a half!” and then cut off all play, which made the game too frantic to be any fun at all.)
I’m so lucky that the guy who leads our gaming crew is the chillest person I know on the planet.
Have you tried any co-op games? The Forbidden Island/Desert games aren’t half-bad.
Maybe there were other rules in previous versions, but as of at least the last couple editions, as far as I remember, you’re allowed to make any trades you want as long as they’re real trades. You can’t trade 3 wheat for 1 wheat, for instance, because that is equivalent to just giving them 2 wheat, and that’s illegal. But you can trade 3 wheat for one sheep. Probably pretty dumb, but you can do it.
The “hardcore” boardgame aficionados have been saying Catan has been over for years now. Good to see it hasn’t gone anywhere yet. I picked up *Star Trek Catan* a few years back, which also included The Helpers of Catan in the form of TOS characters. It was awesome. I always found it to be the ideal way to play the game, especially when just learning the ins and outs.I have young ones now, so Catan is a bit much. My 7 year old has instead learned *Machi Koro*. Similarly you have property and roll dice, but then you make money that you use to purchase additional property – but it’s so cute Japanese shops and whatnot. Plays quickly and easy to setup. Not too much to grok.More fun than that for her has been *Pandemic: The Cure*. It’s a faster to play version of Pandemic using mostly dice. Great cooperative game that lets her role a handful of dice and see exactly how much progress we’re (not) making. As a family we’ve only won 1 out of 7 games, but we’re getting better. It also teaches her how to lose.—-Videogame-wise I’ve been playing *Middle-Earth: Shadow of War*. I love them nemesis mechanic more than pretty much any other aspect of the game. Now that I can recruit an army, which feels a bit like an endgame process, and have discovered I’m only 30% of the way done, I’m losing interest. Might move onto *Bloodstained* soon.
Have you played Flash Point? It’s a 2-6 player game where you rescue people (and animals!) from a burning building and have to figure out the right balance of firefighting vs. rescue. It has a set of less complex family rules and several other mechanics introduced in its advanced rules, with a lot of encouragement from the rulebook to find your ideal balance with house rules. It’s fun for adults and allows for a ton of difficulty customization to adjust to board game loving children of all ages.Or if she loves handfuls of dice and games with quicker play times, Escape the Curse of the Temple is played on a rigid 10-minute timer and involves lots of cooperation, planning, risk management, and panicked mistakes.
I’ve played Flashpoint and enjoy it. My wife finds the theme of the game stressful, so it hasn’t been added to the library if games just yet. Escape sounds good, but my kid is stressed enough by timed assignments in school. They’re good suggestions, though. Thanks!
Ah-ha. Yeah, my love of making tough decisions under time constraints landed me in the medical field, and I still enjoy the same pressure in my time off. Maybe not the best suggestions for people who relax by… relaxing.
Highly recommend Forbidden Island, Forbidden Desert, and Zombie Kids. All really solid co-op games that my kiddo enjoys. Zombie Kids is particularly interesting, because as you play you fill up a sticker book, and every few games you get to open an envelope that introduces new powers/rules/goals/etc.
Ooh, I have not heard of Zombie Kids. That sounds like a good idea…despite the kid’s four nights straight of zombie nightmares last month. (I blame introducing her to “Thriller” on Halloween.) I have Forbidden Desert and think it’s brilliant. Might have to try it with her but think it might be stressful. Worth a shot, though. Thanks!
My daughter is currently in an extremely frightful phase, where she won’t even watch established favorites like Monsters Inc or Paddington because they’re “too scary”, but the zombie game doesn’t bug her at all – I think it helps that the art is pretty cartoonish? She’s also liking Quirkle and Blockus lately, although that latter usually devolves at some point to her just making pretty patterns on the board (which is fine). Neither is technically a kid’s game, but the basic rules of play are simple enough that a kid can pick up on it easily. We just play a bit more collaboratively than we would if I was playing against an adult.
Kids are weird and inconsistent, which is both fun and frustrating. All I can ever do is throw things out to her to see if they stick. This kid has just finished Avatar: The Last Airbender for the 4th or 5th time but refuses to watch The Legend of Korra because of a “scary” scene in the second episode, in which Korra was just making friends with people. (There’s a part of a late Avatar episode she consistently hides during as well. It’s when Aang has kids over for a dance party.)Quirkle sounds like a good choice, and I believe I got it for her cousins a few years back. Definitely will have to consider that one as soon as Christmas.
I think that’s something that gets ignored in all these “Euro games are better than the traditional American Milton Bradley/Parker Bros games” arguments. Euro games are more complicated. That isn’t a problem when the players are all teenagers or adults, but it is when young children are involved, and at least in America, board games are primarily played by children with or without their parents.
There’s some truth to that. Sometimes there is a greater depth of strategy due to there being more choices. But let’s not forget about those games sometimes called “Ameritrash” that have thick as hell booklets full of rules and mechanics that require a few hours of study before your first play.
Have you tried Isle of Cats? It’s basically cat Tetris and has a separate family rules version even my 4 year can manage with help. Plus you’re rescuing cats !
Black Friday was good to my library, but bad to my backlog and wallet.Picked up XCOM2 for my Switch Lite, and its just a perfect handheld game, diving into the new Fortnite season has been fun as well, I love when the map changes and you get that reward trigger for finding a new area and the map clears…its like heroinI miss boardgames with friends, although this long pandemic break will PROBABLY have been long enough to get them all to stop ONLY wanting to play Villainous. It’s fun…but fuck sometimes I just want to play UNO
I carry around a weird resentment towards Monopoly and truly hate that game so much. I recently got into Catan and love the variety it provides across games. This weekend though, I am excited to see the localization of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light and while I am sure I will play it a bit tonight, I know I am going to end up doing another run in Hades. A lot has been said about Hades and how good (creative, rewarding, thirsty — take your pick) it is, but it’s really got its hooks in me deep – chasing the next possible moment of favor or opportunity to upgrade a weapon.
For my gaming, I’ve done what is a surprising amount for me and my infamous potato of a laptop. First up, my wife watching the Hobbit movies on one of the streaming services inspired me to try out a game on my Steam backlog: 2014’s Middle-Earth: Shadows of Mordor. I enjoyed it, although I’m still crap at all video games. I’m having trouble with the archery, but I have been pretty decent at stealth kills. I’ve basically been calling it Assassin’s Creed: The Precious given my play style. I have done the first few story missions, including the first one with Gollum. The story seems fun, but based on the benchmark modes, might have to wait for the new PC.Also inspired by streaming, I returned to our local tabletop group’s Patreon-only Minecraft server. Mostly because one of the admins was streaming his attempts at Minecraft on Facebook. I hadn’t been on in a month or two and things had changed, so I did the usual rebeginning stuff of punching trees and digging this hole:I’m setting up an underground sleeping chamber with beds, furnace, chests, torches and crafting tables as I search for veins of coal and iron ore so I can tool up a little bit and build a nicer house rather than squatting in other people’s dwellings.
Unfortunately, due to limited space on my aforementioned laptop (damn you NaNoWriMo! and uh the next few things listed.) I ended up uninstalling Shadows of Mordor. One of those things I did try out was something I’d talked about for a while but had never gotten around to: Yes, I dropped into the free trial of World of Warcraft. After being surprised at the sheer size of the install (75GB! really?) I recalled that I think I had done a free trial back in the dim and distant past. As in before Burning Crusade existed. Possibly before I moved to the United States in October of 2003 but I might have the timeline off.
I decided I liked the look of the cow dudes, so I created a Tauren character, so I guess I’ll be fighting For The Horde for 20 levels:Also, the character is disturbingly pantsless on the creation screen. In the game itself, Cow Dude (who’s name the RNG made ‘Aitndai’ but I’ll call him ‘Cow Dude’ until the end of time). The new starting area is apparently part of the new Shadowlands expansion. It was a pretty nice tutorial and helped me get the hang of the controls. Also, the ogres made some pretty entertaining opponents and a few sweet jokes, especially the Forsaken necromancer dude who’s speeches made me laugh consistently. It also gets you to level 10 really quickly.
Also nice, the final part of the tutorial is a 4-person dungeon and I was able to do with my wife and a couple of friends, who created alts or took advantage of the free trial. Once that was done, we ended up in the game start proper at the city of Orgrimmar:Unfortunately, at this point the sheer lagginess and age of my laptop conspired against me and the game froze and my character was no longer being displayed. So, I left Azeroth and will probably attempt to return later.
So I went to my comfort zone and was back to Star Wars: The Old Republic and my Jedi Knight playthrough. I feel like said Knight, Elduderel is getting close to the end of his class story, especially based on the loading crawl here: I’m surprised that the text mentioned Voss because I’m pretty sure I’d cleared that, instead I was on the planet of Dromund Kaas, where I had to confront the Sith Emperor in what was the toughest combat of the class story:
I had to get the interrupt timing down right which was a problem with laptop/internet lag. Fortunately I was able to eventually overcome that limitation and finish off the Emperor (I went with dialog option 1 in the screenshot above), so I assumed I had finished the class story. So I was mildly surprised to see this loading message next time I logged in:
Apparently there’s an Interlude before the story is fully over where I have to do some mopping up on the planet of Ilum. I’ll do that and then temporarily uninstall The Old Republic so I have hard drive space to install the latest game I bought: Star Wars Squadrons. Which was on enough of a sale that I don’t mind that I just bought a multiplayer focused game for single-player content.
I also got a quick tabletop session in as we played another session of our Rime of the Frostmaiden Dungeons & Dragons 5e campaign. Last time, my trusty Barbarian as shown on Foundry VTT here: One of the harpies got killed by a combination of the gnome wizard’s magic missiles and the half-elf ranger’s longbow shots. The ranger was shooting while standing up in his small Axe Beak beast master companion’s saddle.
Thanks to rage and several indiscriminate hammer swings, I had softened up the other two harpies without finishing them off, so my wife’s Paladin character did a flying leap off of my Barbarian’s back and swinging her longsword through one of the harpies and then channeling divine smite so the sword was glowing and the harpy exploded in a kill we described as “dope ass anime shit.”The third harpy tried to fly away, but I was able to successfully grab her by the talons and grapple her to the ground, which allowed the Paladin to decapitate it.The combat took up a lot more of the session than was initially planned, so all we were able to do beyond that was explore an iced cave that included all the characters other than my explicitly disabled (he has a prosthetic wooden leg after an unfortunate dire wolf attack in his backstory and a low Dexterity) fell off a rickety bridge and slid down an iced over river. Once I gingerly limped and caught up to them a skeletal undead giant holding a shield that was part of the Paladins family heirloom that was slowly awakening and busting out of an ice wall as the session ended…
Here’s the only difference you need to know. Monopoly isn’t a game. It’s basically just rolling dice and whoever gets the right rolls wins. There are no decisions. You hope you get the right roll for that space you need. Oops! You got one higher, I guess you’ll slog around the board again and hope the right number comes up a half hour later.Catan is a game. There are decisions every step of the way. Everyone is involved on every players turn. Here’s the weird news. Catan isn’t even a great game. It runs a little too long and it’s hard to catch up if you fall behind. There are so many better games out there. Catan is just the key turning point where games got better. It deserves every accolade it gets for that.
Nah, Monopoly is definitely a game. It’s not a great game, but if one person plays Monopoly conservatively and another player takes risks, the second player will win unless they’re pretty unlucky.
I will concede the point that there might be a couple of times where you make a decision. Although most of the game comes down to being the first person to be able to put some houses down.
For those that still rate Monopoly highly, you need to try two games, designed by Sid Sackson decades apart. I believe they are both still available.If you like the collecting and buying and selling, you need to try Acquire. I believe the latest versions have a smaller board. But it doesn’t seem to affect play too much, and newcomers to the game won’t notice at all.If you like the haggling and wheeling and dealing, how about a game that consists entirely of that? It’s called I’m the Boss. It also plays six players as well as 4 or 5. (3 is not great).
Or pick up Ticket to Ride or Carcassonne.
Monopoly is a game, and much beyond the fair of the roll and moves we subject children to (with good cause because they reinforce lessons of counting and taking turns). There’s more than luck. There’s probability (buy the orange properties because they’re statistically more likely to have players land on them), haggling, etc. Now I’m not going to say that those things mean you should enjoy the game more, but it is a game and has merit.Catan is another beast. I sometimes feel the standard game does go on too long, so I like the Helper expansion. Otherwise, the more I’ve thought about it, the more solid I think the game is. No other game has been able to build directly upon the mechanics in this game to make something bigger and bolder. Compare to my favorite game, Dominion, which spawned dozens of games complicating its simple system. Not Catan. Catan simply expands on itself, but otherwise the game is the perfect form of itself. Route building, random production, and trading/negotiating intertwined perfectly in a game the designer describes as cooperative – which it is unless you’re either very lucky or clever. It’s not a game that I want to play every game night, but it’s one that I can appreciate whenever it hits the table.
You are definitely right about no other game has been able to create that combo. I haven’t played with many of the expansions. I gave my copy away to someone starting their collection who had friends who loved it. Now I’m trying to think of what game comes closest to Catan and I’m coming up empty. Maybe worthy of putting it as a question on boardgamegeek.
Games of chance are still games. Saying Monopoly isn’t a game because you have to get the right rolls is like saying poker isn’t a game because you have to get the right cards.CANDY LAND isn’t a game; the entire thing is predestined from the instant play begins.
There are actual championship games of Monopoly where people compete in tournaments (as horrifying as that sounds for somebody who hates the game). There are real strategic decisions to Monopoly, at least if played by the official rules which include auctions. It isn’t like Candyland, which *is* all luck.
Generally I’m not a fan of games that reveal the worst of people on purpose. That’s how you lose friends for life. Nor games that are endless on purpose. So, both Monopoly and Catan are out.
My siblings and I used to have fairly regular game nights, so Catan Universe on Steam has been a pretty great replacement, even though the game itself is a mess of confusing UI elements and cash shop incentives. Once you figure it out, it’s basically just a digital version of the game I’ve been playing for over a decade and is still quite fun.This weekend, I’ll be playing Chess, a game of dual-colored squares and a complicated ruleset for the pieces to follow. And yes, I know the popularity of The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix (great show!) jump-started a huge influx of players around the world (also great!), but I’ve been getting into serious stretches of Chess for years now, starting with Chessmaster on the original Xbox. Josh Waitzkin’s Chess Academy in that game made me see it in a whole new light. Since then, I’ve been able to trounce my family members pretty reliably, but online I’m a pretty average 1200 player. I did recently purchase a subscription to Chessable, an instructional site run by GM Magnus Carlsen and IM John Bartholomew (the latter has an incredibly instructive YouTube channel and regularly streams on Twitch). The subscription price was a bit steep, but I’ve always wanted to up my game, and I’m definitely learning from it. So we’ll see. I tend to get frustrated when my game doesn’t improve after months of trying, and convincing myself I just can’t see the board well enough to get much better, but I don’t want to be a grandmaster or anything. 1600 would be fine with me.Also, I’ll be continuing Nioh 2, which I put off buying for a while and picked up on sale a couple weeks ago. And goddamn, I’m glad I did. It’s glorious. Much better than the first game, which I also liked. Nioh 2 has made me realize how much I miss new Souls games in my life, and while Nioh 2 isn’t quite as polished as From’s games, it’s definitely scratching that itch. The main missions are usually great, reminding me of the best parts of Dark Souls 2 (which, to be clear, I like a lot) with better boss battles to cap them off. The sub-missions, which are technically optional but not really, are a bit messier. You’ll often find yourself in cramped arenas fighting enemies that fill up half the area you have to move, which ends up being more frustrating than it should be. They’re usually short, at least. Overall, though, I am absolutely loving it.
I think Catan deserves credit for breaking me and a lot of people out of the world of boring Milton-Bradley games. I seldom play it anymore these days, but it helped me realize that board games don’t have to be something you ‘wait for the end of’.
I still haven’t played Catan, though I’ve probably played at least a dozen board games inspired by it in some way or another, just based on how many years it dates back and how much more recent most of the games I own are. Over half of my games are co-op, though I’ve had a growing appreciation for euros ever since playing Everdell and realizing I did have a knack for them, as long as I actually knew what the end-game scoring consisted of prior to the end of the game.Just last weekend, I got a chance to replay Wingspan, which I completely ate shit in the first time I played because I was trapped feeling like I had to do things that were immediately available to me to keep from falling behind, rather than taking a couple turns to set up bigger plays and more easily gain points for the rest of the game. And that’s just what I did this time around. And the end of the game was beautiful, because I had zero eggs, zero food, and zero bird cards left in my hand. I found a way to perfectly use all my resources with no waste, thanks to a tricky little bird machine that generated a ton of extra food of my choice and set me up to play more costly birds easily in the late-game. It was especially satisfying to feel that kind of control in a game where last time I felt like a lost toddler looking for his parents in an amusement park, thinking to himself, “This was supposed to be fun!”I just picked up Ceylon as a gift for my euro-loving board game buddy. I had it picked out as a good choice for her like a year ago after seeing good reviews, reading an abstract on the rules, and thinking, “This sounds like everything else she brings over.” Looking forward to playing it with her toward the end of the month.Either way, I really don’t enjoy heavily adversarial games, with the possible exception of Dead Man’s Doubloons, where you really have very little control over which dick moves you have available until the moment your turn comes up, so aggression is never personal because every crime against another player is a crime of opportunity. Even when I’m dominating, I don’t really enjoy crushing everybody else’s elaborate plans to take me down. I’d rather be competing for resources and building point-earning mechanisms out of combinations of cards and tokens and carefully considered worker placement. When I cut my rent expenses at some point next year, I’m probably going to invest in expanding my euro collection. Hell, I might even pick up Catan to see what the fuss is all about.In the video game world, this past week has just seen a whole lot more My Time at Portia. I’m quite certain that just last night I finally opened up the last part of the game world, largely because there is no longer any fog on the map. I still haven’t explored it all, and I think I might still have to build a bridge or two for better accessibility, maybe a couple bus stops, but if I wanted to walk the long way, I can see everything there is to see now. The quests feel very endgame-y, though the last area I opened up is pretty large, so either it’s all very sparse, or a good chunk of it is optional postgame, or the game’s got me fooled and it’s going to feel larger still in another week.I also knocked out the last few achievements in the King Knight campaign of Shovel Knight – beat the game in new game+, beat the game without any upgrades, beat the game in under 90 minutes, collect every Joustus card in the game… I learned to appreciate Joustus more, and I found that the majority of the levels are actually pretty satisfying once you’ve got a handle on how King Knight moves, but the last several levels still just have too many bottomless pits and enemies that aggressively prevent you from recovering from being knocked into them. I still have issues with the campaign, but they’re much more narrowly focused on like 4 of the levels on the 3rd and 4th maps. By and large, it’s a fun campaign, but the end is full of cheap deaths.Tomorrow night is the Shivers race I organized for the 3rd annual Feed the Kids marathon on RetroGamingLiveTV. I’m looking forward to doing the commentary and having a co-commentator to play off of. I’ve run the game in a couple small marathons in the past and most of the community show up in chat, and I was OK with being the face of the community, but this time around I’ve got 6 people from the community directly involved in the race, including a couple people with better times than me. I’d still love to pique the interest of some more experienced runners and really get a sense of competition going for the game. It’s a fun run! More people should experience it!If I start anything new this weekend instead of going whole-hog on Portia, it’s going to be Hollow Knight. I saw someone specifically address my issues with the beginning plodding and directionless, and state that it’s not representative of the rest of the game. That’s encouraging. This might be the weekend it gets a second chance.
It took me like 20 hours to really get into Hollow Knight, but the hours I spent with it afterwards were some of the best of any game I’ve played in recent years. Once you collect most of the Metroidvania type abilities and realize you can go almost anywhere on the map, and you have a whole bunch of charm options you can swap out to find the right combination or each boss, it’s exhilarating. The one thing I wished I had known before getting into it, in non-spoilery terms: at a certain point in the game it will become clear what the endgame objective is and how to achieve it. Delay doing the things that get you towards that objective for as long as possible. Explore every corner of the world and do everything else you can possibly do first. The “optional” parts of the game are the most fun, and you will likely need the powerups you get from them to beat some of the non-optional bosses.
If you don’t want to lose friends over a game, you better not play Diplomacy…..
We all came out friends in the end! But my husband still remembers Russia, even after 20 years.
Any recs for good sites for playing board games w/friends remotely? I’ve been using boardgamearena, which is ok – the games themselves are well implemented, although the rest of the site is sort of hard to navigate. I saw that there’s an online codenames implementation, curious if it’s any good?
One of our neighbors played amateur tree surgeon the other day and managed to cause a very bad, very localized power outage the other night. Kudos to the power company for a reliable grid that limited it to a few homes, but since we were lucky enough to be one of them and the lights weren’t coming back on until late, we played good ol Zelda Monopoly. It was sealed in its package still and none of us had really played it in awhile. My wife/banker was kind enough to offer double the value for the equivalent of the last part of the Connecticut Avenue section of the board to someone who didn’t notice she was both flush with cash and that those properties were cheap to develop. That ended the game pretty quickly. And by pretty quickly, I mean that was in Hour 1 and somewhere in Hour 4 I was finally bankrupt after scraping through multiple times. Just like in real life, the person with scruples gets left in the dirt while the banker who took advantage of someone makes off with everything. I was disappointed to see Control was not coming to Gamepass for PC, but my underpowered graphics card didn’t mind since it wouldn’t be subjected to hours of torture. Instead, the excitement was setting DQXI-S to download last night. Never played a DQ, never ponied up the cash for it, but hey, if it’s “free” I might as well try it. Bonus points, it’s falling in that “boy there’s not a lot I want to jump on” window for games. I thought about Yakuza, but I might let that come down in price a bit. I saw it was discounted on console, but let’s be honest, it would end up like Control, which I sat down and played for about 10 minutes, then played something else. I jumped back into Rocket League for the first time in a month. The challenge structure still irks me in that the weekly challenges don’t stack. It was nice not stressing about getting every one and picking them up as I went along. The tournaments feature is nice, if a bit sporadic. The official ones are locked into 3 hour chunks with a second chance 15 minutes later, but it takes a good long time for them to set up, and then there’s the waits between matches. If you smash a team 4-0 and they forfeit, you’re left to wait for your next match until the next team finishes. This isn’t a big issue for in-person tournaments, but online and in your home, it’s a long time to wait, especially when you’re locked out of every other matchmaking mode, even casual. It leaves a lot of time for you and your team to lose your momentum.One game I’ve breezed through that was a delight was Tetris Effect Connected. The graphics, music and general atmosphere was a wonderful experience in single player. What I don’t recommend is playing through that single player mode, then bringing family and friends to play the multiplayer Connected mode with you. Because “easy” is a very subjective term. The three of you face off on separate boards against an AI and the only way to really attack it is to build enough gauge to start a Connected mode where all three of you share the same board and take turns making lines. The more lines you make, the bigger the attack on the AI. The AI gets quite good, quite fast. Actually, it’s not the fact that the AI gets good, it’s that some of the attacks are more devastating than others. Like one that cuts a diagonal line through the board. Or another that removes or adds random blocks. Or one that just removes your ability to hard drop a brick. Also, it’s 3 AI opponents in a row and if you’re not in sync, the match can definitely drag on. It’s definitely a mode that requires a little more time with the single-player campaign than you’d think. Still quite fun.
This is a good gateway game to really great strategy games. If you want to get people in the door, start them here.
Been playing Persona 5 Royal for the past few weeks and loving it so far. I’m 24 hours in and I still have no idea where the story is going to go. I do think there are some parts that get too narrative heavy. After the second dungeon there’s a good 4 hour chunk with no free time to actually walk around or do mementos. Some of the dialogue is also a little slow. It’s acted very well, but having everyone explain the ideas of palaces every time a new character joins them is very tedious. Excited to finish it though
I’m pretty sure that this scomment thread brought Ben Wyatt to completion.