Catan, the internet and the marketplace of ideas

When I first got into gaming about twenty years ago, there were three games that seemed to be in every group’s collective game closet: Settlers of Catan, Puerto Rico and Carcassonne. Very quickly, Ticket to Ride got added to that list. (It had to actually get published before anyone was willing to play it)

I’ve found myself thinking about these four games and wondering where to ramble with them. I could write about how the hobby has changed and there isn’t a unifying game like these were anymore.

But honestly, that’s a delusionally nostalgic viewpoint. It’s picturing a world where BGG was the center of the gaming world. Plenty of folks were playing Axis and Allies or Battletech or Titan and didn’t know Catan existed. (And that’s not even getting into Chess or Rummy or Scrabble or Poker or Go or- you get the idea)

Yes, the gaming world has become bigger and more mainstream and more varied. But it’s not like it was a magical Smurf village twenty years ago.

I also don’t think they represent a golden era of gaming and game design. We are talking about a ten-year span. That’s pretty short compared to Mancala or Chess but that’s a long time in the modern market. And it’s not like there haven’t been a ton of great games since then.

My next thought was that the game that actually mattered was Catan because, love it or hate it (I love it), no one can deny that it changed the landscape. But I don’t think that’s quite what I’m looking at either.

Then an idea occurred to me. We are looking at games that came out as the internet was becoming more and more mainstream. It is now so ubiquitous we carry the internet in our pockets but the internet changed so much. (Wow, there are grownups who have always lived in a world with the internet. )

I firmly believe that Carson, Puerto Rico, Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride are all great games that will still getting played twenty years from now. I also think they were in the right place at the right time to take advantage of an algorithm we didn’t even know existed.

Thank you, Mr Teuber

Klaus Teuber 1952 - 2023

Damn.

Okay. I am going to say this first: While Teuber made many other games, some of them jolly good, the reason why people will still be talking about him a hundred years from now is Settlers of Catan. And people _will_ be talking about him as long as the world isn’t a post apocalyptic wasteland (which will not be nearly as fun as Gamma World or Max Max)

And let’s not kid ourselves. Catan had an impact on the gaming world like possibly nothing else. The closest thing I can think of is Magic the Gathering but Catan hit a much wider audience. It was the family game’s family game. And judging by its continued sales, still is.

Catan’s impact on the gaming world was like a naked man throwing petrol bombs in a department store on a late Tuesday afternoon. (Gaming buddy: that was disturbingly specific. Me: good, I was trying to disturb you) We would not have the gaming landscape that we have today without it and I don’t think the universe would have come up with an equivalent.

I know that it was where my transition from RPGs to board games started with Catan. And I still hold that, in this post-Catan world that we all get to live in, Catan holds up with an amazing level of engagement and interaction.

If I end up in an Isekai novel, I am introducing Catan to the fantasy world I am stuck in.

Thank you, Mr Teuber, for making my life better.

I wow t let optimal play ruin my Catan

To gamers of a certain age, Catan is ubiquitous with entering the hobby. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I think the options have grown so much greater that no single game draws people in.

(I do suspect that Dungeons and Dragons still holds that place for RPGs. But with the sheer number of exceptions and loopholes baked into every edition, after you’ve played D&D, you’re ready to take on almost every other system. It’s a useful starting point) 

I have met people who put Catan on a pedestal and people who have nothing but disdain for it. I’m closer to the first group but I try not to have my glasses too rosé colored. (And apparently the game continues to sell just fine)

A big reason that I hold that Catan still hold up is that it does such a good job keeping all the players engaged and active in the game. The trading is intrinsic part of player interaction.

But… 

I’ve been told by multiple competitive players that tournament-level players in Europe almost never trade. That they consider trading to be a very weak, desperation move.

So… am I wrong? Is what I feel is one of Catan’s strongest points contrary to optimal play?

Well, I’m prepared to accept that that is a reasonable argument. But I’m going to play the social card. 

Catan is a family-weight game for a family audience. And under those circumstances and conditions, trading and interaction is good. So there.

I’ll save the optimal play for if I ever get back into Go.

Elasund: first pit fight of Catan

 After the actual Settlers of Catan itself, my favorite Catan product might well be Elasund: The First City of Catan. (Settlers of the Stone Age is strong competition for that title, though)

Elasund is a tile-laying game where you are building a city on a grid with the first player to get to ten victory points winning.

The Catan part of the game is that the columns of the grid are numbered two to twelve (but no seven) You roll 2d6 and buildings within that column produce gold or influence cards. Sevens let the active player choose a column and players who have victory point cubes in that column lose resources.

Building buildings requires resources AND building permits, which are placed on the board. AND you can use someone else’s permit as long as you have more of your own. And larger buildings can knock down smaller buildings.

There are more details to the game, like spending lots of gold to build the church or building walls or covering up windmills for points. There’s a lot going on in the Elasund and I’m not going to go over the rules in detail. (Other folks have done that)

But here’s the thing. It is a knife fight in a phone booth. I think I have to play Reef Encounter to get more of a claustrophobic sense of confrontation. Elasund is very confrontational and things can get very nasty very easily. Conflict isn’t just taking a spot someone else wanted. It is stealing their building permits and knocking down their buildings. And conflict isn’t an option you might take. It is an integral part of the game and it will happen.

And, yes, I consider that to be a point in Elasund’s favor.

I do think that Elasund isn’t super intuitive BUT that might just be me. The end game tends to be brutal with lot of buildings getting bulldozed and I have never done well. AND a game being tough and having a real learning curve is NOT a negative.

For a group of my long distance buddies, Elasund was a standby. We’d get together and Elasund would hit the table after Notre Dame. I don’t think I’ve even played my own copy of Elasund but I still have it in storage because it is that good.

I know I can really enjoy non-confrontational games. (So many of them can be played solitaire without any changes) But I do like me some conflict and Elasund really delivers. 

What do people do with Catan dice?

Since I have been playing so many Roll and Writes, I decided to revisit one of the first designer R&W I’d ever played, Catan Dice. Other than as a way of fidgeting on my phone, I have pretty meh memories of the game. As I recalled it, it was basically Yahtzee with a Catan-shaped score board. In some respects, it was even more restricted than Yahtzee since you had to do things in order.

So I played it again. And, after years of exploring R&Ws, particularly light, casual weight ones, Catan Dice was actually worse than I remembered. Before, I didn’t like how it completely failed to capture the feeling and interaction of Catan. Now, in addition, I found it dull as a dice game. The one design choice I liked was the knights/jokers. 

However, I decided to look at the variations that existed, including one that was one of Klaus Teuber’s original designs for the game in the first place. 

Catan Dice Plus has players competing to reach ten points first and fighting over largest army and road. Okay, other than not having a solitaire option, this is better in almost every way from the first version that got published. There is some actual competition and tension going on.

Catan Dice Extra has you fighting over the same island on a shared player sheet, as well as fighting over longest road and army. That actually crosses the line to pretty much being a full-fledged board game.

(Oh, and doing some research while writing this, I found out someone made some home brew expansions for the original game. I guess I’ll check that out.)

Honestly, if I had to pick one for multi-player, I think I’d go with with Plus. There’s not enough to the original game and Extra makes me ask why not play the travel edition of actual Catan.

Over the years, I’ve played a lot of Catan, Catan expansions and Catan Spin-offs. I particularly like Elasund. The dice family seems like the lightest and weakest branch. But I am glad that folks keep playing with the design. 

Fleeting memories of the Book of Catan

In my memory down memory lane, I came across a memory I haven’t thought about in a long time. Die Siedler von Catan: Das Buch zum Spielen. It’s been well over a decade since I last saw what might have been the only copy I’d ever seen.

Das Buch, as it was called at the table, is a collection of scenarios for Catan. There are fifteen different rule sets in the book that tweak Catan, as well as the components in order to implement them. It’s basically a huge set of expansions. I’m also pretty sure that it was only ever published in German, although translations were available. (I think Mayfair provided one and I think that’s the one we used)

Sadly, I don’t remember Das Buch that well. It was a couple different lifetimes ago. I know that I played three different scenarios but the Great Race one is the only one I remember. Which I might have won and definitely thought was fun.

Now that I remember that Das Buch actually exists, I really want to go and take a look at it. It feels like it could be great or possibly just great for its day. Some games, like Memoir 44, thrive on having variants and scenarios. And Sid Sackson knows, Catan has had a lot of them, although I don’t know if I’d say all of them have thrived for me.

I know there are English translations floating around the internet. Boardgame Geek itself has a couple. So I can at least read the scenarios, even if actually playing them might be tricky. Could be amazing discoveries. Could be just interesting historical footnotes.

My first expansions of Catan

While I am rambling down memory lane about expansions (I promise I won’t do this too much), I find myself thinking about Catan. While Carcassonne was where I really explored expansions, Catan was another space I discovered expansions early on.

At the time, as far as my group was aware, there were three expansions: the five to six player extension, Seafarers and Cities and Knights. There’s quite a bit more now but that’s what we knew about. And, as time has gone on, my opinion about each one has basically reversed itself.

I used to think of the Five to Six Player extension as the most essential one to get. But I now think that adding more players just makes the game drag. There are much better games to play if you have six players.

I originally thought of Seafarers as the weakest expansion. I mean, it added ships and gold tiles. It didn’t really add anything new that I could see. Well, I was dumb because it adds versatility and variety to the game while still being true to the core system. (I have been told it was supposed to be part of the original game) A very important idea in the game (at least to my mind) is the modular board and Seafarers really explores the mechanic.

Cities and Knights. Man, Cities and Knights. That was a game changer in so many ways. Cities and Knights changed Catan so much it was like a different game. It added at least another level of the economy and infrastructure. It added a whole new form of conflict.

At least one friend of mine said that you don’t want to play any other kind of Catan after you first play Cities and Knights. Then you don’t want to play it again after the fifth play :D Cities and Knights added complexity but it felt like it didn’t add depth, at least compared to the complexity it added. I will say this for Cities and Knights, it did a good job of adding  theme.

It didn’t take my group long to decide that we just liked four-player vanilla Catan. And, while we live now in different parts of the country, I can safely say that we all still really like Catan. It was a binding experience and the expansions were a part of that.

How deep can a dry erase game be?

One of my fantasy goals is finding a dry erase game that has the heft of a game that, you know, has components. Basically, the idea of playing a heavy game while sitting in an airplane. And, yes, we already have that and it’s called use a tablet, silly. Which we have done, in fact.

Still, the idea of going low tech is appealing. There’s the ‘look ma, no batteries’ factor, of course. However, actually doing something with real stuff with your hands adds a visceral level to a game.

A few years back, I checked out a game called Akua that looked like the ideal I was looking for. It was a perfect information game that was just a board then add different colored markers. So, mechanically, it is the kind of game you can play on a Greyhound bus. Which was a really cool idea to me, even though I haven’t been on a Greyhound in a dog’s age.

The problem was that Akua was intricate to the point of being convoluted. It didn’t flow. I am not saying I’ve completely given up on it but it’s got issues.

Basically, I’m asking for the unreasonable :D The game I want needs to be simple enough that it can work within the medium but deep enough to be meaty and satisfying.

Well, I’m going to craft a couple games that I think will scratch a similar itch.

One is Tempus Imperium, which I understand to be the prototype of the Tempus Quest series. It’s a Roll and Write but you use the time and date instead of dice. I’m quite curious to see how it turns out and I might check out the Tempus Quest series if I like it. It’s infrastructure building with a random setup based on when you’re playing it. No dice required, just a watch.

At the same time, it’s a solitaire so it kind of fails one of basic my needs. But the idea, if it works, seems like a good building block.

The other game I’m looking at is a Catan variant called Catan Coop. It’s an ink friendly Roll and Write where you’re working together to each get seven points before the bandit destroys too many hexes, which the bandit can do in this variant. You keep track of resources on a table on the same sheet of paper as the map. You do need dice and a pawn for the bandit. Beyond that, everything is either drawn or notated on the one page. 

It does lose some points in that you do need dice and some sort of pawn. But I suppose that a metal clipboard and a magnet for the pawn plus some sort of tiny dice tray could make it work for the mythological Greyhound that I’ll never get on.

Still, for a stupidly portable form of Catan, it’s worth my looking into. Print the board with the table one side, the rules on the other, and laminate it. I can stick that in my bag where it will take up no space and play it anywhere. This is Catan for a backpacking trip.

If it’s any good, of course. I mean, it doesn’t have development cards which is a major loss but understandable to simplify the game.

As I’ve already mentioned, the idea of a travel dry erase heavier game is unnecessary. Honestly, tablets make more sense. But it’s fun to think about.

Playing Dante’s Inferno felt like being there

Take a simple dungeon crawl. Now, set it in Dante’s version of Hell. Finally, add the Catan economic system. That might sound cool but what we got was a complete, horrible mess.

Climbing into the Wayback Machine, I rediscovered Twilight Creation’s Dante’s Inferno, a game I apparently did my best to block out. A friend of mine got it around when it first came out. We were already familiar with Catan and we thought it was promising but we were done by our second play.

I have a weird opinion of Twilight Creations. I sincerely believe that they love what they do and are trying to give the world cool games. And I think they are willing to take chances. But so many of their games that I’ve tried seem like they need two more rounds of development.

And Dante’s Inferno is near the bottom of the heap for me. But not as bad ZombieTown. That was literally unplayable, although a horrible rulebook had a lot to do with that.

You steadily build a square spiral to the center of Hell where you try and defeat Lucifer. Each space has a number and resource and if one of your pawns is on a space, they can earn that resource Catan style and spend it on different effects.

Back in the olden days, the game just ended up being a tedious slog. Now, older and more jaded- I mean wiser, I can see why Dante’s Inferno has so many problems.

The combat, which consisted of trying to rolling high on two dice, was simplistic and weighted against the players. (Which is thematic, seeing as how damned souls shouldn’t have much chance against demons, but still not fun) Fighting demons is something of a last resort but it should be more interesting.

And the Catan economic system doesn’t mesh well with the rest of the system. You don’t really set up an infrastructure, particularly since other players can force your pawns to move. Everyone’s resources are public knowledge and there are ways to directly attack the other players, so trading isn’t as desirable.

And the rulebook was so bad that we weren’t at first sure how you fought Lucifer (turns out the same as any other combat). And you had to collect and then spend resources to build the inner layers of Hell, turning just progressing into a slog. And- THERE WAS JUST SO MUCH THAT DIDN’T WORK!

If we had come across Dante’s Inferno a couple years later with a lot more games under our belt, we wouldn’t come near it. At the same time, I have a feeling if the game had been developed a couple years later, it wouldn’t have so many issues. Welding a Euro game structure to an adventure game theme was pretty experimental and daring for the time. I have to give credit where credit is due. But the experiment failed.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6201/dantes-inferno

Random babbling about the travel version of Catan

A recent thread on Boardgame Geek asked folks what game they owned the longest.

Not counting games that my parents bought during our childhood and RPGs, I think it’s a toss-up between Fluxx or The Very Clever Pipe Game or the first travel version of Settlers of Catan. 

I haven’t pulled out the travel version of Catan in a long while. The last time I got it was for a trip to a family reunion. (Where I don’t think it even got played :D)

Pulling it out again, I’m struck by how both clever and dated the design of it is. 

The board itself is a peg board with little holes for the tiny plastic roads and settlements and cities and big, numbered pegs for the hexes. (The hexes have holes in the middle with the desert in the middle so the numbers are laid out the same way every game) The insert is set up as a bank for all the cards and pieces.

What really makes it lovely is that it isn’t just small and easy to store or carry. It also takes up so little space the play. You might be able to make it work on an airplane tray. You could definitely play it on a TV tray or just about any space at a coffee shop or bar or restaurant.

There are a number of things that make a travel game work. It’s got to be easy to pack. It is good if it doesn’t take much space to play. (The card versions of Samurai and Tigress and Euphrates fail miserably there) And you and everyone else has got to want to play it :P

This version of Settlers of Catan manages all that.

It does have some flaws. The fixed numbers is a definite limit. I understand later versions of the game actually have rules for randomized numbers (which I don’t like at all) and this is the complete opposite. And it is completely incompatible with any expansions.

More than that, the materials are definitely from a past era. The tiles are thin and the insert is decidedly flimsy. Compared to games from even ten years ago, the quality isn’t there.

I haven’t seen the later travel set that has built in trays and what look like decent card banks but it looks sturdier than the version I have. It might take up more table space but I doubt by much. Still, I don’t see any need to trade up.

When I first got it some fifteen years or so ago, I felt like this was all you needed for Catan. A couple years later, getting to try out different expansions and variations, I felt that the travel set was not nearly enough. 

Now, I’m in between. If you are serious in any way about Catan, you need more. However, if you are going to just play Catan a few times a year, yeah, you could get away with this.   

For me, though, it was the just the start. I got back when I just imagined my board game collection would fit into a backpack. Boy, I had no idea.

Muddled memories of Mayfair ribbons

I thought long and hard about what else I wanted to write about Mayfair Games closing up shop while that was still fresh and on my mind. I mean, when I started really playing and collecting games, Mayfair and Rio Grande were the two major ways to get European-style games in the US (Boy, has that ever changed) I’ve played a lot of different games that I got from them. 

But when I started looking through the lengthy list of games Mayfair has published or distributed over the decades, I realized it was too wide a range to really pin down. I’ve already written about Catan and I’ve never cared for the crayon train games (For me, they've always been hours of tiny, incremental moves) Too many games to generalize.

However, what has been uniquely Mayfair for me has been my experiences with the company at Origins and GenCon.

Yeah, I’m talking about the ribbons.

I’m not sure when Mayfair started the ribbon program. I want to say that it was around 2005 or 2006 but I am convinced I went to a few years before the ribbons came along. If I’m wrong, I’m sure someone will correct me.

Here’s how it worked. You could earn different ribbons named for the different resources in Catan by demoing various Mayfair games. When you had a set of the five resources, Mayfair marked the ribbons (since you got to keep them) Then you got some tchotchke, a raffle ticket and (most importantly) a 50% off almost anything Mayfair coupon.

You could trade ribbons with other folks or trade in three of a kind for another. Since, at least initially, train games were the only way to get Ore, that encouraged a lot trading of one kind or another. Almost all the train games took place in the Puffin Billy room and were longer than the other games.

Now, I might be completely wrong about these next two memories and I’m sure someone will call me out about it if I am. But I believe Mayfair didn’t add the resources from Cities and Knights until a least a year later, those let you get a Knight of Catan ribbon, along with another raffle ticket and another tchotchke.

And, I would swear that GenCon didn’t have a lot of Essen style demo tables when I first started going in 1999. (I’d also swear it was mostly war games and RPGs) I _think_ Mayfair was one of the first companies to do that at GenCon. The last time I went to GenCon in 2014, companies had demo tables everywhere.

There are two games that I got to really enjoy, entirely due to the ribbon program. Station Master, because it was the shortest game to get Ore so we played it every year, and Patrician, which was one of the handful of games at the Knight level. I had previously tried out both games at minimal player levels and not liked them. Thanks to the ribbons, I played them in larger player counts and found they were really good then.

The ribbon program was a big part of our convention experiences. Me and my friends, we’d look forward to playing those games and getting rewarded for it :D It changed the way we experienced the exhibit hall.

Why Mayfair Games mattered to me

On Friday, February 9, Mayfair Game’s announced that they were closing up shop.

Let’s be honest. It wasn’t a giant surprise. When Mayfair sold Asmodee the US rights to the Catan franchise a couple years ago, it was obvious that things were winding down or at least changes were in the air.

For me and a lot of my friends, it’s the end of an era. Although, to avoid being too melodramatic, I got to admit I’m sure most of the games are still going to keep on getting printed, just without a Mayfair logo. But Mayfair was a big part of our lives.

And all that can really be explained by Catan. 

First of all, Mayfair, of course, brought Settlers of Catan over to the US. And Settlers of Catan was a major entry point for me and many of my friends into the world of games outside war games and mass market games. I first played it in 2002 or 2003 when visiting a friend in another state and it took me a little while to really get up to speed. But it was a big deal.

Second, the Catan tournament scene. While I have played in the tournaments over the years, I was never that serious about it. But a lot of my friends were very serious. (I’ll be honest, part of my participating in the tournaments was so I could hang out with them)

But, over the years, playing over the years, even I got to know and become friends with the folks with regularly played in the tournaments. I also got to know a number of the people who worked for or with Mayfair. I’m certainly not claiming to be any kind of insider but I was at least part of the extended family of the serious tournament players.

What I’m not doing a great job saying is that Mayfair didn’t just introduce to games but the way they ran their tournaments introduced me to a lot of people and friends. They didn’t just help me  develop my hobby but honestly changed my life.

When I started writing this, I thought about talking about some of the other games Mayfair has produced or my GenCon experiences with Mayfair. And I might still write about those. I mean, I could write a couple blogs just about train games and I never even got into crayon train games. And I still might. 

But this is the most important thing I have to say about Mayfair.

Struggling to find something nice to say about Catan Dice

As near as I can tell, I actually haven't written about the Catan Dice Game, other than taking playing it solitaire back when I had an android phone. Which is odd, because I was pretty sure that I had. Well, if I did, it would have been close to ten years ago.

Okay, short version. The Catan Dice Game is really, when you get down to it, Yahtzee that uses a Catan map for a score sheet. You build roads and villages and cities and knights, albeit in a specific order. The five resources are on the rather nice dice, plus gold. Two gold make a wild and the knights each serve as one-time resources.

And I ultimately found the game dull, even disappointing. I actually enjoy Yahtzee and games like Take It Easy that are genuinely multi-player solitaire. But, for me, the heart and selling point Catan franchise is the heavy player interaction. 

It also doesn't help that, since then, I have played dice games like the Zooloretto dice game and the Bohnanza dice game that used mechanics from their parent games and felt like I was playing games from their franchises. The Catan Dice Game just doesn't measure up to that comparison.

I do have two caveats.

First of all, I play it a lot back when I had an Android phone. It was fun as a way of fidgeting. 

Second of all, I understand Klaus Teuber actually originally designed a more complicated and interactive game and his publishers insisted on the simpler version. (Since the dice game has sold very well, I can't even say they were wrong.) Since the initial release, which is when I got my copy, variance have been released and some are even now included in the game.

So if you want to accuse me of not giving the game a fair shake, that's reasonable. It has clearly come a ways since that first edition.

I was tempted to buy a copy again when I saw it on clearance the other day. The original base game was pretty meh for me but I do like the dice and maybe some of the variants would make them sing.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/27710/catan-dice-game

Making a short list for non-gamers

I was recently asked to suggest a game as a gift for a family whose gaming experience was primarily Trivial Pursuit. 

Here's a spoiler: there aren't going to be any surprises on the list I gave them.

I went with the idea of games that were accessible and fun and relatively easy to find. I also wanted to make it a fairly short list, to keep myself from getting out of hand.

Here's what I came up with:

Ticket to Ride

Dixit

Can't Stop

Take It Easy

Out of that lot, not knowing the folks involved, Take It Easy would be my top pick. I've had a lot of success with it with folks who have no interest in games to the point of getting repeat plays in the same sitting.

They went with Catan.

Which was my real introduction to designer games and I do think is a great game, as well as revolutionary one. However, I have also taught to non-gamers who found it too heavy. I love it but I have to wonder if it's too big a step from Trivial Pursuit. 

If they had said Monopoly, though, my list would have started and ended with Catan :D

My takeaway from this is that I might be too conservative and too safe in my choices of games for non-gamers. After all, I know someone who used Puerto Rico as their game to break in new gamers. Although, they were dealing with folks asking for games. And I've seen folks who thought 7 Wonders would be the perfect introduction and that went up in flames.

I do sincerely think that people who play lots of games all the time often underestimate the complexity of games. (Teaching Race for the Galaxy with three expansions comes to mind. Seriously?)

At the same time, am I being too conservative? If folks have a regular game night with Trivial Pursuit, maybe they will want something longer and with more teeth. Maybe my bad luck with Catan just means I'm a bad teacher. 

It is a good question. Yes, an overwhelming game can spoil someone from wanting to play another game but it isn't helpful if they aren't engaged or challenged.

Looking at my past means looking at Catan

Like a lot of people who got into boardgames around 2000 or so, Settlers of Catan was my entry point into designer board games. Other games like Carcassonne and Puerto Rico and, yes, even Fluxx played important roles but Catan was the very first.

I first encountered Settlers of Catan visiting my out-of-state friend Doug. It would actually be a while before I'd play again or really get into board games but that was the very start. And when I did start really getting into the newer board games, Settlers of Catan was at the forefront.

As I commented before, Settlers of Catan was a lot of people's introduction to designer games/Euro Games/German Family Games when I first got into myself. I wonder if that's still the case or if there's another new entry point. There are a lot more games out there and a lot of good ones. But Catan has also reached the point of being mainstream. Worldwide, really. It is still a good game, one I still play when I can.

Over the years, it feels like I've seen a lot of Catan hate in the actual community. Some of it, I think comes from the same kind of thinking that when everyone starts liking the band that no one ever heard of, they stop being cool. 

I also wonder if the fact that Catan is fundamentally a family game is another reason that some folks have issues with it. Because while there are ways of attacking each other and it is anything but a cooperative game, you still have to interact and get along with each other well enough to pull off a least a couple trades. I have played with folks who could keep a mental spreadsheet going that I would need excel for but who couldn't trade for beans.

I haven't heard this old saw in a long time, the idea that non-gamers would compare anything they'd see you playing to Monopoly. (So, Twilight Imperium? It's just like Monopoly, right?) My favorite experience like that was someone watching me teach Zendo and saying "So it's like Mastermind but with Tetris pieces" to which I replied "Exactly" since that was a pretty good call.

But, in many important ways, Catan is like Monopoly. If you play Monopoly as a trading game about infrastructure development, that is. If you play Monopoly as 'roll the dice and go round and round the board', you just like hearing me scream.

Still, all the things that make Monopoly actually worth playing (developing an infrastructure, wheeling and dealing as you trade with each other, the dice making everything uncertain and exciting) are in Catan, without the stuff that makes people burn bundles of Monopoly in a bonfire. That's part of what makes it accessible.

At the same time, Catan was the first board game I ever played that was truly inclusive. Between the possibility of being able to get resources on anyone's turn and trading, Catan does a good job keeping everyone engaged all the time. No long waits in between turns where I can go and make myself a sandwich.

I think Catan's true strength and staying power is that it is fundamentally about interacting with the other players. On the one hand, you have to get along well enough to make good trades. On the other hand, you have to be prepared to stomp their faces into the dirt with the bandit and monopoly card and cut them off. That's a pretty high level level of interaction within a pretty simple set of rules.

Settlers of Catan is a milestone in boardgames. It really did change the hobby. But, more than that, I think that it is a game that still has the place in the world and in a lot of people's collections.

Beginning civilization with Catan

One of the defining games of the hobby is Civilization, the old Avalon Hill game about building up a civilization over epochs. Not to be confused with the computer game series, which is also a defining game. And resulted in Avalon Hill suing Microsoft and losing.

However, one of the downsides of the game is that it takes 6 to 8 hours to play, and tends to fall more under the eight hours. That's the kind of game that you need to schedule and clear an entire day for. So, there has definitely been a push for all of that in a shorter playtime.

Some of the key benchmarks to a game really giving you that civilization building feel are an epic scope, developing technologies, warfare, and an economic system, one that usually involves trading. 

Often, it feels like a game that is trying to achieve this will either end up being a territory/wargame or an engine building game. There is nothing wrong with any of those things. A game can fail to be a Civ Lite game and still be a really great game.

To be honest, I've been kind of out of the loop on Civ Lite games for a while. I am willing to bet that some interesting ones have come out in the last few years that I have no idea about.

However, one game that I have had in my collection for quite a while that would be my Civ Lite game of choice if someone asked me to pull one out is Settlers of the Stone Age.

Yup, a Catan spinoff from 2002.

The two elements that really make it actually feel like a civilization building game for me are the scope and the fact that there are technology trees. 

The scope in particular is what really gets the game that epic feeling. The map is the entire world, which is pretty much as big as you're going to get outside of science fiction settings. However, what really gives a sense of time and space is that, as the time goes on, Africa gets turned into a desert by over cultivation. When something like that happens in the game, I feel like it really evokes the passage of time.

The tech trees are pretty darn simple. However, you need to advance in things like clothing and shelter in order to be able to keep on moving across the map. So they are an important part of the game and they thematically makes sense.

Of course, the fundamental engine behind the game is still Catan. There are some very significant differences, including the fact that you are moving your camps/settlements across the board instead of building a permanent infrastructure. But if you don't like it you're not going to like this game.

I don't view Settlers of the Stone Age as an alternative to Catan or a variant. It's not a game I would play if I were in the mood for a good time. It is a game that I would play if I want to have a sense of the earliest days of civilization as humanity spread across the world.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4394/settlers-stone-age