[chimeracoder]

Catan was my first German-style board game[0].

I've since "graduated" on to more complicated games, so I rarely play it anymore, but I find that it's an effective "gateway" German-style board game. Almost all of my friends who have played it love it, and have gone on to try (and enjoy) other German-style games. Catan is nice because it's sufficiently more complex (and well-designed) than Monopoly so as to be interesting, but not so complex that the rules take ages for newcomers to learn (as is often the case with many more complicated games).

My personal favorite at the moment is Through the Ages[1], though I'm also a fan of Puerto Rico[2], as it's a rare example of a good game that has (almost) no random elements to its gameplay, such as rolling dice or shuffling a deck. (There is one set of tiles that is shuffled, but it's rather inconsequential and could easily be made deterministic if desired).

Here in NYC, there's a cafe dedicated to board games and which was funded on Kickstarter[3]. As a huge board game geek, I'm really glad they're catching on.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-style_board_game

[1] http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/25613/through-the-ages-a-...

[2] http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3076/puerto-rico

[3] http://www.uncommonsnyc.com/

[graylights]

I'd argue that Catan is much less complex monopoly. Just that most people learn monopoly at a very young age so they never notice the complexity. Monopoly's rules are 6 pages of pure text. Catan's rules are 4 pages with some illustration.

I don't understand at all why monopoly is the universal board game that every kid learns. It's a horrible game that drags on for hours. Even though I don't particular care for Catan it'd make a much better universal board game.

[derefr]

> I don't understand at all why monopoly is the universal board game that every kid learns. It's a horrible game that drags on for hours.

Well, inasmuch as it does that, it's teaching the correct economic lesson: when you allow for monopolies, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and social mobility (what a game designer would term "avoiding lame-duck scenarios") is nowhere to be found.

I'd say Monopoly is actually great to play with kids... once. Right after they develop naive libertarianism as an ideology. ;)

[philwelch]

Yeah, that was the original point of the game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord's_Game

[thatswrong0]

That might be valid if most modern monopolies weren't the product of government intervention.

[mseebach]

In the game this is exemplified by forcing you to progress through life on a preset course and force you to pay rents to the incumbents that you come across on that narrow path.

The dice roll of course represents that life is unpredictable. But I struggle to find the real world analogy where I go bankrupt because I randomly end up in a hotel in Park Avenue.

[talmand]

Never mind the fact that you are forced to move every day from a location you likely can easily afford to a new location not knowing whether you can afford it or not. How can you plan for the future when you move from $200 rent to $2000 rent in a single day with no new income?

What strange shenanigans is going on that compels me to move so much? Especially moving into hotels when I previously lived in a house.

For that matter, if a property doesn't have a house nor hotel what am I paying rent for? The street?

Also, why can't I build a house on my property unless I own the two or three properties in the same area?

I also fail to see how one is supposed to learn anything about economics from the game other than just the basics that takes five minutes to explain.

[derefr]

Modern economics? No. Land-title-era economics, where owning land meant you had autocratic control over it and could kick people out of it? Yes. To translate to modern economics, you have to change the names of things a bit.

Picture each set of colored properties as a separate country. You are an entrepreneur, so when you land in a country, you implicitly try to start a business there. The "base rent" for that country is the cost of doing business--corporate tax rate et al.

Each square within a country is an industry. As you build "houses" and then "hotels", you take over that industry. (Houses and hotels themselves make sense as markers if the industry you're taking over is real-estate; otherwise, interpret them as the symbolic equivalents for their own industry. For a manufacturing industry, this would be exclusivity deals with parts of the supply chain. Etc.)

When you've got a full set of houses on a square, you have a monopoly in that industry. This isn't as useful, though, as having bargaining/lobbying power from multiple industries that operate in the same country--having houses on all the squares. When you do that, you can convince the government to give you their contracts--to enforce the mega-monopolies for you, like in telecommunications or defense. These claims are represented by the hotels.

When you land on a square, and someone else has a monopoly there already? Your implicit entrepreneurial bid will be quite a bit more costly. But, of course, your customers expect you to expand into new territories, even if someone else controls them, so expand you must.

(I'm not sure what the railroads and such then represent, though. There aren't that many global utilities that actually give people power when they control them; the shipping-container era kind of fixed that. The internet backbone might seem to be a contender, but it doesn't really make that much money for the people who control it.)

[javert]

Not most, ALL. Even "natural monopolies" like power delivery are not natural, and only actually come about through government intervention.

[mdmarra]

Monopoly only drags on for hours if you play by silly house rules like $400 for landing on Go, money for landing on Free Parking, or not requiring an auction when passing on purchasing a property. All of these common house rules artificially extend the game by either injecting cash into the game or slowing the acquisition of property.

A vanilla game of 4 player monopoly should take no more than an hour.

[twoodfin]

In my experience Monopoly games played by the official rules with experienced players would drag endlessly due to trade negotiations. Typically, whenever a player was clearly in an advantageous position, the remaining players would form a loose alliance, shuffling properties and cash in an attempt to stymie the leader. The leader would fall back into the pack, a new leader would emerge, and the whole process would repeat. Every iteration would require a substantial amount of discussion, proposals and counter-proposals for an equitable but effective distribution of properties and cash amongst the "insurgents". Any thoughts on what we were doing wrong?

Catan at least has the advantage of monotonically increasing building and army points: Given enough time and even barely rational spending, a player is guaranteed to reach 10 points, no matter how alliances form and splinter.

The biggest problem we encountered in both games was the "spoiler": The player who was not in a position to win, but was in a position to determine the winner. Either you try to impose hard-to-adjudicate rules requiring "rational decisions" or you accept that a long-running game may be decided by caprice.

[ryanfreeborn]

Back when my friends and I played Catan a lot, we developed a simple way to avoid the spoiler effect: running point totals. Games are still played in regular fashion, but your victory points for each session are added up over time. Winning a game gave you an extra VP in the running totals. You can set the constraints to whatever you want: a year's time, 6 months, 10 games, whatever it may be...at the end of the time frame, whoever has the most victory points wins. Put some money down at the beginning, and you've got great sustained competition.

Obviously it only works if you play with the same people regularly, but in my experience that's actually the norm.

[philwelch]

The spoiler just adds a level of metagame. You can cripple me early in the game by repeatedly putting the robber on my best hex, but by doing so you've made an enemy for the rest of the game.

[nl]

*In my experience Monopoly games played by the official rules... Any thoughts on what we were doing wrong?"

I'm guessing you weren't actually following the rules[1]. If you do follow the rules you'll find liquidity gets sucked out of the game by continual reselling because you are only allowed to sell unimproved properties, and have to sell houses & hotels back to the bank at half price.

[1] http://richard_wilding.tripod.com/monorules.htm#sellingprope...

[twoodfin]

That rule was followed. Given that we were playing with 3-4 experienced players, monopolies were rare (everyone bought essentially every available property landed on that was still potentially monopolized) and most targeted the sweet spot of three houses. Monopolied properties weren't traded often, but even then that's not a lot of liquidity to sacrifice with ~$800/board cycle going into the game via passing Go.

Once a few monopolies did crop up, it was the remaining unimproved properties that would be swapped most often for ludicrous amounts of money to allow, say, a cash-poor player to build a few houses in the path of the current leader.

[Someone]

"The biggest problem we encountered in both games was the "spoiler": The player who was not in a position to win, but was in a position to determine the winner."

I guess you are not a fan of Diplomacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(game)), either.

Most, if not all, games of more than two players where players have some free choice eventually boil down to "you can't win it alone. You need help or a blooper from your enemy"

And that is true in sports, too. In any distance running, starting at 800m, athletes collectively make a choice whether to run a fast race or a slow race with a very fast finish. A fast sprinter will not win a fast race, so runners with lower top speed will try to make a fast race. Still, they won't want to be running in the front, they rather have another runner with lower top speed burn energy doing that.

This gets more evident the longer the distance and the larger the advantage of running in the slipstream of an opponent. Road races in cycling are perhaps the ultimate example. If "the peloton" doesn't want you to win, you have to be extremely good _and_ lucky to win.

[philwelch]

To me the problem with Monopoly isn't just that it takes forever, but that you can get into a commanding position early and spend most of the game slowly bleeding your opponents to death one by one. Monopoly is a game to resent people over.

[protonfish]

Which is why the game should end as soon as there is a clear winner. I find tipping the board over to be effective in this regard.

[thedufer]

To go a little off topic: this is the same style of poison that causes MOBAs to have such toxic communities, exacerbated by almost complete anonymity. At the lower levels, easily 95% of games are decided in the first 10 minutes but last 30-40. Only once you reach professional or near-professional play do you hit the point at which most games end within a minute or two of the winner becoming obvious.

[dredmorbius]

Quite. When played with children (of any age) it frequently ends in tears.

[michaelochurch]

Monopoly's predecessor was The Landlord's Game, designed to teach people about the evils of capitalism. You moved around the board, got robbed, it wasn't fun.

Monopoly changed it up by making it possible to become the evil landlord, and that's what made it successful.

[afterburner]

"or not requiring an auction when passing on purchasing a property"

This is the key one.

[idProQuo]

Speaking as someone who was bad at monopoly as a kid, those cash injections helped make the game feel more "fair". The vanilla rules make it really hard for a newbie to win against someone who actually knows how to play strategically.

Now, that doesn't justify turning the game into a 4 hour slog, but it may help to explain why so many people use these "wimp rules".

[spiritplumber]

You've just explained European vs American style capitalism.

[mdmarra]

There are definite "winning" strategies - like acquiring a monopoly on "jail row" and mortgaging all other properties to build it up as soon as possible. But does altering a game so that a child doesn't have to see the optimal moves from someone else do anything positive for anyone playing the game?

[jonnathanson]

I'm going to guess, based on a lot of observation, that most casual Monopoly players of any age don't play strategically. They rely on the dice, negotiate badly (if at all!), buy everything they land on without any master plan in mind, and ignore cash flow until it becomes an issue. These are the opponents most kids will play against in ad hoc games of Monopoly, and in these games, kids will have a grand old time. When the outcome of each dice roll is the most decisive factor in a particular session, a child is at less of a disadvantage.

Also, fwiw, 99% of casual players I've seen overvalue the marquee properties like Boardwalk, etc., and undervalue the oranges, light blues, and reds.

[idProQuo]

> But does altering a game so that a child doesn't have to see the optimal moves from someone else do anything positive for anyone playing the game?

It didn't, it was a bandage to cover the fact that Monopoly is not a very good kids game.

[jon-wood]

> not requiring an auction when passing on purchasing a property

That rule is so rarely followed I end up in an argument with other players every time I play a game of Monopoly for attempting to play by the rules. People don't even believe that the rule exists, never mind make a conscious decision not to follow it.

The fact games of Monopoly always open with an argument is probably a big factor in me no longer playing Monopoly.

[Pxtl]

I'll disagree with the Catan-is-less-complicated. For one thing, Monopoly builds on the familiar roll-and-move mechanic. For another, Catan's setup process is hellishly complex. Maybe if you bought the Family Edition (where you can't customize the board), then Catan is simpler, but otherwise?

Catan's manual is short because it's excessively terse. I've never seen anybody successfully learn Catan from the instruction manual.

Also, while Monopoly has some absurd tacked-on rules, Catan has some strange edge-cases that confuse the game - like the trick where you can break an opponent's longest-road if you can plonk a settlement somewhere along it.

[mbrameld]

I don't think Catan's setup is that complex. The board edges have numbered ends, you just match numbers. Then you can either set the hex tiles like they show in the manual or you can shuffle them and set them randomly. Then you set out the numbers in the order the manual specifies. That's not that hard.

[nogridbag]

Oh wow. Apparently, I've been playing Catan incorrectly the whole time. I never knew an opposing player's settlement can obstruct my own path (and split a path into two).

[jl6]

It definitely splits a longest road but does it obstruct you in building further?

[kidb]

I'm too lazy to look it up right now, but I think you can continue to build on the road, BUT if they put a settlement at the end of your road you can't continue to build.

E.g. if [x] is your settlement, [o] is an opponent's and = is a road:

[x]==[0]= <-- you can build another road here [x]==[0] <-- you can't build another road

[nogridbag]

See here:

http://www.catan.com/faq/4624-roads-may-roads-i-build-go-thr...

[VLM]

Sorry for the late post, but its a very stereotypical american board game vs eurogame difference that all the complexity in American board games is in the rules, not in the resulting gameplay, but in eurogames ideally the rules are as short as possible and all the complexity is in the gameplay. The ultimate extreme american game would have something like the entire code of federal regulations for rules, but gameplay would boil down to each player rolls dice and highest wins. The ultimate extreme eurogame would have two printed rules "1) each player flips over one card per turn and follows instructions. 2) First player to 100 points wins" and would come with 50 cardboard playing mats, an entire carpentry shop worth of brightly colored wooden counters, and probably a cuckoo clock.

Whats more complicated, Chess, or Go?

Its not the only categorization rule, of course. I think "Chutes 'n Ladders" would technically qualify as a eurogame solely under the "simple rules" rule, but it fails as having no social interaction, no strategy element, extreme influence of randomness, being designed and marketed extremely strongly toward the 5 yr old mind, etc.

[JoshTriplett]

Chutes 'n Ladders, much like Candy Land, is not a game in the strictest sense: the result is entirely random, and there are no decisions to make. In both cases, the game is only an exercise in following rules, counting, moving tokens around, and winning and losing graciously. There's value in that, but calling it a game is a stretch.

[VLM]

I agree with that interpretation. Unfortunately (old) American board games were mostly like that, resulting in Americans getting their minds blown when someone pulls out a copy of PowerGrid.

[enraged_camel]

>>Monopoly's rules are 6 pages of pure text. Catan's rules are 4 pages with some illustration.

This doesn't necessarily mean Monopoly is more complex. It just means they used lots of words to describe what is ultimately a fairly simple game.

[walshemj]

Yes I woudl have said that Catan is a lot more complex tactically - Agricola is another good Euro style game.

[talmand]

There's a much simplified version of Monopoly intended for kids that involves locations within a park that you place booths on. The buying and selling mechanic is there but rules concerning property is greatly reduced.

That's what I introduced to my daughter concerning Monopoly and she loved it. Helped her with the concept of basic math as well.

[adamconroy]

I can attest that it does drag on. There is an unfinished game from the weekend sitting on my desk, and we were playing with the accelerated rules.

[epsylon]

To be honest, Monopoly is really a terrible game. It's mostly a game of luck (getting the good dice rolls).

Catan is nice, but it does suffer from the same problem, the dice rolls influence way too much of the game.

My personal favorites for long games are: The Game of Thrones board game, which is really awesome with the right set of players because it favors a lot diplomacy and strategy (the biggest problem with it is the randomness of the cards, but you can patch the rules to correct that); Eclipse, a 4X strategy game, quite balanced and with interesting rules (the bigger your empire is, the more costly your actions are); Civilization the board game, which is also extremely well balanced (all games I've played have seen cultural, financial, military and technological victories being competitive); and finally, for some good fun with friends, Battlestar Galactica (w/ expansions), which is a classical cooperative board game with traitors (except for a few twists). The tense atmosphere of the TV show is well re-transcribed in the game.

For short to averagely long games, my favorites are Agrikola, Race for The Galaxy with the first two expansions (I've probably played hundreds of games of this one at this point), Olympos, Caylus, Power Grid (with slight patches to the rules), Smallworld...

If you like games with no chance at all, try Intrigue. It is a game of pure negociation and backstabbing, and you may end up angry with your friends after playing it :-) (which is why it gets very polarized reviews on BGG and equivalents; much like the GoT board game, it is a game where you have to make alliances and betray them in order to win).

[michaelochurch]

Catan really invented the "German" aesthetic. Yes, it has dice, and yes, there's luck; but it deserves a lot of credit because it was the first.

[epsylon]

I certainly wouldn't deny it. I'd much rather play Catan than most games, anyway.

[michaelochurch]

I created a card game (Ambition) to unify the German aesthetic and the trick-taking genre, which turned out to be hard to do. The problem is that it still has too much luck (dealt hands) to appeal to the German-style crowd, but it's too complex for the people who enjoy card games for simplicity [0] (e.g. Hearts, Poker). So it's kinda "between worlds". I feel like Catan might suffer that if it came out today, even though it's a great game in its own right.

I like German games a lot but I'm not a fan of the "if it has dice or cards, it's not worth playing" mentality that I sometimes see. Games have a variety of social purposes. Sometimes I want to play something like Cards Against Humanity and sometimes I want to play Tigris and Euphrates. Ain't nothing wrong with that. (I do get annoyed with the people who only want to play Texas Hold 'em, though.)

[0]: I don't mean to imply that these games are without depth. It's just that the rules are simple, and the complexity comes more from the players.

[205guy]

That no-randomness mentality is a bit odd, but I admit that some games don't integrate it well. In Catan, I think the random element is well-done because it is the board and its distribution of resources that is random, not so much each player's turn.

I'm not sure what a "German aesthetic" would be in a card game, but one Austrian trick-taking card game that is a lot of fun is Schnapsen. The cards are random, the trump is random, and you draw cards each turn adding temporal randomness, but outwitting the randomness (and your opponent) is part of the appeal. It's slightly complex (a bit more than Hearts), but still way simpler than Bridge. Each round is fairly fast (5-10 minutes), and you can play a match (to 7 points) under an hour.

Apparently, it's called Sixty-Six (Sechsundsechzig) in Germany, though Schnapsen is a variant.

http://www.pagat.com/marriage/schnaps.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixty-six_%28card_game%29

[epsylon]

> The problem is that it still has too much luck (dealt hands) to appeal to the German-style crowd

Well it depends, when there are dealt hands, we usually do some kind of drafting with my group (even when it's specifically written in the rules) because it helps dealing with the randomness factor a lot, while still providing the added re-playability that cards add in a game (and other random factors, like dices - for example in Myrmes, where they determine events that are common to all the players).

Agrikola for example features a LOT of cards which add an incredible depth to the game, and drafting allows you to carefully prepare your combos and make sure that you don't get too many or too few good cards. There's randomness in the way the Agrikola board is setup as well, so overall there's a lot of replay value with that game. For me it's one of the greatest example of modern German-style games.

(I mentioned Race for the Galaxy earlier, and it's a card game only, but there's a ton of strategy within it, and drafting + using the provided starting worlds helps mitigating the randomness out of it. (A few patch to the rules can be used as well for experienced players). Sometimes you'll be a bit lucky or unlucky, but the upside is that with experienced players, games are short and luck averages out quickly.)

> I like German games a lot but I'm not a fan of the "if it has dice or cards, it's not worth playing" mentality that I sometimes see. Games have a variety of social purposes. Sometimes I want to play something like Cards Against Humanity and sometimes I want to play Tigris and Euphrates. Ain't nothing wrong with that. (I do get annoyed with the people who only want to play Texas Hold 'em, though.)

I completely agree.

[ntaso]

If you like Catan, check out one of the apps for Android/iPhone that uses an algorithm to make the basic setup more fair. I tried one for Android a few times and it was always a close call. The game was much more engaging for players that have a bad start than if you set up the game in the proposed fashion.

Usually, the algorithms do stuff like:

  - if there's a 6 and 8 next to each other, the third field is always a 2 or 12
  - there's always wood next to clay
  - a 2:1 harbor is never next to a huge field of one type of resource (say, 2-3 grassland)
  - etc.

[tmhedberg]

> - if there's a 6 and 8 next to each other, the third field is always a 2 or 12

At least in the version of the game that I own, if you follow the prescribed setup rules, there can never be an adjacent 6 and 8. The terrain tiles are randomized, but the placement of the numbers on the tiles is deterministic, and results in a spatially uniform distribution of the high-yield numbers.

[ntaso]

That's true. The apps distribute the numbers differently to make it more interesting. I don't know the exact rules, but I know that 6 and 8 may be adjacent, but if this happens, there must also be 2 or 12. Just give it a try, it's fun :)

[thedufer]

> the placement of the numbers on the tiles is deterministic

Not quite; the random placement of the desert tiles affects it, and you choose at random where to begin placing. That said, its still impossible for there to be adjacent 6s/8s.

[Casseres]

If you liked Puerto Rico, I recommend Dominion [0].

[0] http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36218/dominion

[wwweston]

I like Dominion, it's got some of the same mechanics and is a an easier game to set up and explain.

But it's missing one key thing that Puerto Rico has -- the depth of subtle interaction. Yes, there's some interaction cards in Dominion, but with PR there's this level of play that goes beyond blocking other players and into providing incentives for them to do things with a timing that's advantageous for you (and slightly less advantageous for them, but not so much that they can resist :).

Not a whole lot of games like that.

[VLM]

If you want a highly interactive card game, maybe pathfinder card game? Be sure to go on line and print out the errata which is several times longer than the rules as shipped, although its certainly good fun even without corrections,or optimizations. Note its co-op which tends to be pretty binary, people seem to either love co-op or hate it.

[lostlogin]

I'll add a recommendation for Power Grid. Its interesting turn order and great build up to the end game is in contrast to the sudden halt that Puerto Rico seems to lurch into when it ends. http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2651/power-grid

[idunno246]

and if you like dominion, i recommend quarriors. Its dominion with dice and pvp

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/91536/quarriors

[frik]

I have no evidence but Catan [0] feels to me like a board-game copy of the german "The Settlers" [1] computer game. I own both the board game and the earlier video games.

The Settlers video game is a more complex and is more like Age of Empires (a few years later) but with a focus on low level business and building up of an economy. You need a forester, lumberjack and a sawmill to get planks. You need a well, a corn farm, a corn mill and a baker to get bread. But the basic goal is to expand your territory like years later in Catan. Anno [2] video game series is very similar to The Settlers with a focus on trading ships and islands.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Settlers_of_Catan

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Settlers

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_(series)

[jon-wood]

If you enjoy The Settlers you should find a copy of the 10th Anniversary Edition from somewhere - the game has been near perfectly ported to a modern engine without changing any of the actual rules.

[tfgg]

In Oxford there's http://www.thirstymeeples.co.uk/. It's really good for finding new games, as they've got roaming board game specialists that will recommend a new game, help you get set up and teach you the basics. I just wish they'd get an alcohol license ;) (if only to help their profitability!)

After playing a fair bit of Catan, I tend to get frustrated with how it's just a bit too random to establish complex strategy. I rather like Dominion for variability and depth.

[pliny]

How do they keep the food off the games? Is everything covered in plastic?

[tfgg]

It's honestly not an issue I've ever seen come up... though I have wondered about how the extent of wear and tear on the games over time is going to affect their business model.

[nnnnni]

The problem with Puerto Rico is that there is often only one optimal move -- and sometimes that optimal move doesn't do anything for you, it only spoils someone else's strategy.

[nostrademons]

But that's probably the best part of it. Your Puerto Rico skills go way up when you realize it's a game of relative advantage and not absolute advantage, and that your best strategy involves keeping careful tabs on what your opponents are about to do and either thwarting them or incentivizing them to do things that are good for you.

It's like chess or go in that you need to keep careful tabs on your opponent, but can be played with 3-5 players.

[pavel_lishin]

I also like the Uncommons, but I recommend checking their schedule if you'd like to visit - they often host events that end up making the place quite crowded (e.g., MtG tournaments)