Don’t just surrender to the absolute randomness of the numbers that may or may not produce resources when the dice are rolled. I soon learned that while the Longest Road is helpful, my approach to placing those first Settlements needed to be better balanced.Ĭatan is a dice game. I decided to try and follow this idea and focused solely on the two things necessary for roads: brick and wood. One of my regular gaming friends likes to go after the Longest Road.

Part of Catan’s success has been due to designer Klaus Teuber’s ability to combine different gaming mechanics (resource management, trading, route building, dice rolling) in a way that made the game easy to teach and learn, while maintaining enough depth to make the game challenging for serious players.ĭespite it being such a relatively simple game, there are some people who shrewdly manage to convert resources into points with speed and ease while others seem to be barely getting started by the time another player announces they’ve scored their tenth point and have won the game.Īfter my most recent back-to-back losses I decided to take a closer look at Catan and see what I’ve been doing wrong and, more importantly, what I should start doing right. When Catan (or The Settlers of Catan, as it was originally named) was first published in 1995 it created something of a revelation in board game circles, undeniably changing the way people would look at board games and gaming in general.

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