"""Every once in a while, he would bring the new game upstairs to test it out on his family. They would play along, but Teuber could tell that the game wasn't working. Sometimes, in the middle of a match, he would notice his youngest son, Benny, reading a comic under the table. Other times his wife would suddenly remember a load of laundry that needed immediate attention. After each of these sessions, Teuber would haul the game back downstairs for further refinement. He repeated this process over the course of four years."""
This is all to say that the UI is very important, but to consider games as chiefly UI is to fundamentally misunderstand what games are and how we interact with them.
peter [at] pchristensen [dot] com
SoC suffers from a bit of a compound interest effect: a few bad (non-producing) rolls at the beginning can screw you for the entire game.
To make up for this:
Anytime there is a roll on which a given player doesn't get any resources (and not because of the thief), they are given a penny.
During trading, a player can buy a resource from the bank using pennies for the cost of number of victory points showing.
This dramatically reduces run-away-winner syndrome.
If only someone could do something similar for mana drought/flood, Magic would be a pretty good game.
That being said, I find that they are quite the leveler; high tempo decks with less lands suffer less than a control deck, but need mulligans more often. It's a trade-off, and evens out the playing field more than people realize.
Square-root hack is as follows: regular rounds are scored on the square root (rounding down) of the deadwood difference, capped at 5 points. Undercuts get a bonus of 3, plus the square root of the differential. Gin scores 4 plus the square root of the opponent's deadwood. So the ranges are:
Regular: 1-5 Undercut: 3-6 Gin: 5-13
The victory condition is to have win a round when you have at least 20 points, and you are in the lead.
Second-turn Gin is extremely rare, but first- or second-turn knock is not rare. With the regular system, a second-turn knock (pure luck) can be a 60+ round, and that's more than half the game. With this system, it's only 5 points.
For instance, lots of people like to feel that when they win, it's because they were skillful, and when they lose, it's only because they were unlucky. On the other hand, if you really _are_ investing your skills in your decisions but still lose due to luck, you'll be really frustrated. Catan does an excellent job of keeping players busy, but essentially on an equal footing of powerlessness. On this basis it really appeals to people who get all kinds of nervous when asked to play any kind of game of skill with friends.
While unpopular with skill players, variance is handy in casual games like Catan because it broadens the range of people you can play with. Variance in the form of mana-screw in Magic does the same thing, with the bonus of allowing you to compete with a wider range of skill and money levels.
edit: NM, I misread your last sentence. I've never seen a territory run dry for the whole game, but this would indeed prevent that.
I would turn that around. The luck factor in Fluxx is staggeringly high. However, what makes Fluxx fun is that it does not make any attempt whatsoever to hide that fact.
My problem with SoC is that it has a very high luck factor, but that the game also tries very hard to hide that fact. The expansion Cities and Knights or using a deck of cards with the dicerolls make SoC bearable.
Seriously, though. It was just okay. The game always ended just when things were getting interesting.
Basically, start at the top and go down: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame
Settlers, Bohnanza and Carcassonne are excellent starters into the world of boardgames. Geeks will want to graduate to Caylus, Puerto Rico and the like later on.
I think they redesigned the game recently, so it's possible the new version of the expansions won't work with our original edition anyway.
These days, we're mostly into Puerto Rico, Ticket to Ride (various editions), Carcassonne (also somewhat luck-based), Power Grid/Funkenschlag and Agricola.
You should buy such extensions if you have played the basic game a lot.
Games also last longer with this extension, count on 3 to 4 exciting hours.
Since I'm on hackernews, I've always wondered when this game would pop up and what other board games you would advise. I'll have a look at Puerto Rico asap.
If you're just looking for a list of games to try, see http://www.boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame and start from the top.
Also, most (good) board game shops have an open play night where you can go in and check out whatever you want. This makes putting $80 down for that copy of Agricola much easier.
If you're in the greater Seattle area, Uncle's Games at Redmond Town Center has a game night on Fridays. They're also the best game shop around, imho (although I might be biased, they know me by name).
When reading this article I had to keep looking up at the dateline to make sure I hadn't accidentally slipped back into graduate school. Talk about existential terror.
The moral of this story is threefold. First: I was a much bigger game geek than I ever thought I was. Second: Your business can take a really long time to reach its full potential. Third: Just because something is old news to you doesn't mean that there aren't lots of people encountering it for the first time.
Yet even I knew what Catan is. Even my wife does, I told her about 3 months ago that the next time we waste money on a board game we're actually going to get one I like, so I pointed it out to her.
So even for me that was a sort of bizarre 'deja vu' experience. Then again, I grew up in the UK so I suppose this game probably hit the market much bigger and much sooner than in the US. I guess an addendum to your second moral is that foreign markets can act in unexpected ways.
When I play Catan I just feel like I'm following a train track - zero options.
I prefer Warcraft, the board game! :)
It's much more for the hardcore tabletop gamer, though. (As is the StarCraft board game, which is quite different but also wonderful.)
Has anyone played Diplomacy and/or Long live the King? I love their concept, although I haven't played any of them..
Slightly off-topic: I play a lot of rpg's, but for some reason I don't like their newer versions, ie d&d v3+, vampire: the requiem etc. Are there any others who have gone through the different versions? How do you feel about the most recent ones?
And there is a java version called jsettlers with online ladders and so on, that helped a lot to spread word about Settlers. The java version was created to test artificial intelligence applications for robot players, with some success (although robots never beat a trained human).
Settlers as a game pushes the player to discover different business strategies and to commit to them; in between strategies never win. And always to invest! Cards in the hand lose value very fast (and get taken away en masse with a 7, and by the robber as well). It's fascinating.
Edit: some here mentioned the "Cities and Knights extension". I have never played the game without them -- even back in 2001, the board game you can buy on a shop already had Cities and Knights included. I didn't know it existed without them at all.
Edit 2: the JSettlers applet: http://www.jsettlers.com/
And there's also another open source version, Pioneers : http://pio.sourceforge.net/
It's called "Xplorers" for copyright reasons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlers_of_Catan
It's called Settlers of Catan.
Just when things would get boring on the skills side (someone was far ahead of everyone else), luck would rush in to make things interesting. Just when things would get boring on the luck side (a series of bad rolls), there would be opportunities to strategize around it.
I haven't played it in years, though (not near that group of people anymore), so it was a pleasure to see this pop up on HN. And it is pretty relevant insofar as the "programming" and game loop is quite clever.
There are some great online versions too (asobrain, jsettlers, etc... would provide links but I don't know what the best online versions are today).
If you're new to boardgames and like Settlers, I recommend going to BGG (boardgamegeek.com) and checking out their list of the top 20 or so games and trying some of those.
If you're looking for people to play with, there are a number of active boardgame Meetups. You can also check out http://www.brettspielwelt.de/, which is a German site with a lot of popular boardgames available for online play.
Happy gaming!
Also the settlers of catan card game is very good in my opinion (I like it much better than the board game).
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/47
It's about free-style trading much like Monopoly should be, except that it doesn't suck.
