Thanks for such a detailed response! It just so happens that Eclipse, Twilight Imperium 4e and “Some Grognard Wargame” are on my lists… I’ll be sure to bump them up higher now. I’ve played Settlers of Catan four times and have lost every single time. I’d definitely like to get better at it. Does Rym and Scott have a “Learn and Win” series on Settlers? If not, any good threads to refer to?
How to win Catan:
1.) Open trash can
2.) Place Catan in trash
3.) Close trash can
4.) Purchase Archipelago instead.
In honesty though Catan is fine enough, but there’s so many games that can do what Catan does far better. It’s joined Risk and Monopoly as a game with deep market penetration that geeks love to beat up on. The best advice for winning Catan though is to try and build on as many different numbers as possible. It’s amazing how many times in a row you can roll a “3” on Catan’s dice.
I’ve heard a lot of good things about Clash of Cultures
Most games in the civilization genre start out by asking “How do I describe 10,000 years of human history?” For Clash of Cultures the designer looked the first 100 turns of Civilization 5 and asked “How do I boil this down to a 2-hour board game?” This is in fact a compliment to CoC’s design, because the focus is on exploration and discovering synergies in the technology shrubbery that’s the bulk of your player board.
1 Like
This is common received wisdom among hobby gamers right now, and I don’t think it holds up to the light of day at all. Settlers is so much better than some uh… enthusiastic modern board game fans give it credit for.
If Settlers of Catan were released for the first time tomorrow, it would still be a seismic event. Many people have convinced themselves otherwise.
Edit: I can even imagine the r/boardgames thread… “Sidereal Confluence meets Root? Let’s talk about Catan”
3 Likes
If you could expand on your thoughts about Catan I’d love to hear them. I was being hyperbolic for effect, but Catan falls flat for me more often than not when I bring it in front of friends that also play games regularly. Just this weekend I played a game after two rounds of Antike II, and the game of Catan ended when we realized that one of the players had won 3 or 6 turns ago without noticing.
Settlers is a great game. The only flaw is that it lacks strategic depth. Anyone who plays it enough and tries hard enough can develop effectively perfect directional and positional heuristics. It’s not mathematically solved and stupidly simple like Tic-Tac-Toe, though, so adults can get quite a lot of play out of it before reaching the point where it is no longer meaningful to play.
Here’s how to win at Settlers:
- Put your settlements on the places with the best odds of producing resources (6/8)
- Either go brick/wood and get longest road with lots of settlements or go rock/wheat/sheep to build a tight network of cities and buy lots of cards to get largest army.
- Basically never trade with anyone unless you are ripping someone off. If you make a fair trade with a player, consider that you are basically both scoring 1 VP. You had better know exactly how many VP every player really has when you decide to make such a trade.
- Rob whoever is in first place when rolling a 7.
- Hope the dice roll in your favor.
When we reached peak Settlers in our group we would consistently end the game where one player had 10 and all the other players had 9 and would have won on their turns. Also, once we got into the game, every player could accurately predict every other player’s turn effectively perfectly.
Various expansions (Cities & Knights) or other versions (Starfarers) give some life to the Settlers formula and are worth playing. The problem is that just playing a completely different game is usually a better use of time.
1 Like
Sure - I’ll type up some more detailed thoughts after lunch but mostly the popular euros for a long time (maybe not anymore?) were efficiency/conversion games with limited player interaction. Settlers has similar trappings - get resources, turn them into points - but compared to something like Agricola or Terraforming Mars it’s this weird uncaring system. Everybody’s crushed together on a too-small island and you can’t get what you want when you want it. The game generates unusual windfalls of things you don’t need, and your only protection against all this capriciousness is… the other 2-3 people sitting around the table, who are all having the same problems as you.
So you try and bootstrap yourself enough to ride the lightning to self-sufficiency and squeeze out those last few points, only you have to help someone else to do it. Sometimes an asshole gets road-building at exactly the wrong time and you have to entirely reroute your plan… or just abandon your poor settlement entirely. After an hour someone gets crowned king and you all agree that the dice were bullshit this time and the robber almost stole the victory but couldn’t aim well enough, and you have a good laugh about it.
The most FRC game of Settlers imaginable.
I remember the day we ruined Citadels forever.
Scott and I started shuffling our cards so as to act randomly. We didn’t even look at what we were playing.
This was a winning strategy. It removed any attempt by other players to anticipate our moves. Everyone started doing it. The game became now nothing more than a race to build buildings with the resources you could get from semi-random role choice.
Someone could choose not to shuffle, but depending on where in the turn order they were, it was varying levels of bad for them. Other players now had a piece of information to use against that player, or to their own benefit.
My final perfect winning strategy was to select two or three roles from the pool I had in-hand and randomize among them.
Once you can’t second guess other players, and you’ve mastered basic optimization of the building parts, there are no decisions to make in Citadels other than “Among which and how many cards do I randomize my role this turn?”
Maybe you sometimes have to decide between building A or building B. Maybe.
This is also what I arrived at as the winning move, (not counting “cheating”). Here is why:
Consider this situation: I have a lot of blue buildings. The Bishop is a stronger play than any other role for me. The merchant and king are always moderately good moves. At the current game state, the warlord is a bad move because there’s not much out there I can meaningfully destroy.
I could play the warlord and basically guarantee that I’ll be able to safely make a play without thief or assassin or whatev, but why? To win I need to do strong moves, not weak plays. I could take bishop, but the chance of being ruined is high. Everyone can see I have a lot of blue buildings. If I look at the cards and select one consciously, then the odds of me having bishop are too high.
So the best move is to take bishop, merchant, and king, and randomly pick one of the three. Other players see I did this. Do they risk targeting bishop with thief or assassin on the off-chance that I picked it randomly? If I unluckily don’t get bishop, I still get a good play on king or merchant that should be strong enough to win. If I do get it, I also get a great free defense against being targeted.
Is Cities & Knights actually good? It was recommended to me when I started playing Catan, but I’ve never had a satisfying game of it. If I recall correctly, the barbarians show up real quick and ruin one player right off the bat. My advice would be to play something else entirely once the base Catan is played out.
It’s not great, but it’s something. I generally feel the same way. If Settlers is done, play something else entirely.
I am trying to imagine exhausting the joy of playing Settlers, and quickly arriving at the conclusion that we are playing games for completely different reasons.
(I actually arrived at that conclusion long ago)
Anyway, your ability to solve a political game (such as Settlers and, to a lesser extent, Citadels) will only carry you as far as you are able to model the other players in the game or apply group social pressure to make them to conform to your model. I suspect these evolved naturally within your playgroup and met in the middle.
You might as well solve Diplomacy immediately before a cabal conspires to eliminate you.
1 Like
This very accurately describes the core FRC approach to most board games.
Not all, mind you, but it’s definitely a prevailing phenomenon.
3 Likes
As a post-RIT entry into the FRC, I humbly accept my role as spoiler. 
3 Likes
core FRC approach to most board games.
As a post-RIT entry into the FRC
…FIRST Robotics Competition?
E: I wither in horror and shame as I look to the URL
1 Like
Front Row Crew
/15 characters
1 Like
I think the problem ended up more that no one could convince anyone to do anything they didn’t want to do, coupled with everyone having the same high order heuristic for who’s winning and what the optimal move would be for any given situation.
There was no information or skill imbalance. Everyone knew at all points exactly who was winning. No one could trick anyone else into trading with them because they “only have 7 points” despite being two cards away from Largest Army.
No one could try anything clever, because everyone saw what was possible at all times. Nothing could be a surprise.
No one would ever make a sub-optimal move (i.e., one that could possibly benefit another player without an equal or greater benefit to themselves). No one would ever leave an unblocked settlement location. No one would ever build a road in a useless place. No natural opening for a novel strategy could ever appear on the board.
If you can’t trick someone into kingmaking you, and you can’t do something unexpected, there’s nothing to do in Settlers but maximize one of the three optimal base strategies.
It wasn’t that we never traded. It was that trading was strictly political in relation to who was winning the game.
Trading usually only happened between the two people who were in second place, or occasionally between one of them and the last place person. No one would ever trade with the first place player AND everyone knew who the real first place player was at all times.
The last place player would try to spread trades evenly, but usually last place was effectively tied among 2-3 players.
Most importantly, no one was ever willing to take any action that would help someone else win unless it helped them more. I’d gladly trade with player 2 if I was player 3, but only if I was sure it got me more real points than them.
1 Like
But player 2 was smart enough not to make this trade, and that’s how we ended up with basically no trading.
Except Greg. Oh Greg.
1 Like
To go back to the question asked, there are TONS of board games out there. Most, if not all, of the people on this forum have been into board games for at least 5 years easily, if not much much longer. If you’re still enjoying Settlers of Catan, don’t let anyone tell you to play something different.
Additionally, you have to feel out what types of games and complexity levels you prefer. Twilight Imperium and Root are both amazing games, but not everyone can jump straight from the shallow end of the pool into the board game equivalent of the Marianas Trench. What games you get is also dependent on the other people you play with. You may love a particular game, but if you only have a limited group of people you play with, and they don’t like a certain game, or a certain type of game, or a really complex game, they’re not going to want to play that game with you.
You’ve bought Istanbul and Castles of Burgandy. Those are great games that are more difficult than Settlers of Catan, but aren’t super complex. Have you played them yet? Do you enjoy them? If you do like them, what do you enjoy about them? Did your group enjoy them?
If you played Sid Meier’s Civilization, and that game went over pretty well, Eclipse and Clash of Cultures (already mentioned) might be good follow-ups. You might also like Kamet, which is less 4x and more confrontational. You might like Runewars (the board game not the miniatures game).
I guess my overall advice is to take it slow and play and enjoy the games you have. There’s no reason to jump from having 3-4 games to 20 games overnight. If you’re still enjoying your current games, stick with those and get a new game when your old games become stale.
Everyone on this forum (myself included) is coming at your question from years and years of experience playing board games, which is good, but not necessarily helpful to a new player starting out.
Just my $0.02.
2 Likes
We were deep enough into terrifying heuristics in Catan that the exception to the “you can only play one card per turn” rule was not only a common occurrence, but regularly discussed and internalized by all players.