The Settlers of Catan

The Settlers of Catan from Mayfair Games is an award-winning strategy game where players collect resources and use them to build roads, settlements and cities on their way to victory. The board itself is variable, making each game a little different from the next. Each round of The Settlers of Catan is intended to keep three or four players ages 10 and above engaged for up to 90 minutes.

The board consists of 19 terrain hexes surrounded by the ocean. Each type of terrain produces a different type of resource: brick, wool, ore, grain or lumber. There’s also a desert hex that produces no resources. As the game progresses, players use resources to build roads along the edges of these hexes and settlements or cities on the intersections where three hexes meet. Each player begins the game with two settlements and two roads.

Each player’s roll of the dice causes certain hexes to produce resources, which you collect if you have a settlement on one of them. On your turn, you’ll use various combinations of the resources you’ve acquired to build new roads and settlements, upgrade settlements to cities, or purchase development cards. The ability to trade resources with other players adds a new level of strategy and ensures that the game includes lots of interaction between players. You can also trade without worrying about other players using an unfavorable maritime trade rate. Elements including a robber piece that lets you steal from other players and a variety of development cards add intrigue to the game.

The objective of The Settlers of Catan is to be the first one who collects 10 victory points. Each settlement is worth one victory point and each city is worth two victory points. You can also earn victory points by holding the “Longest Road” card, the “Largest Army” card, or special victory point development cards.

The Settlers of Catan Reviews:

We were a little apprehensive about playing this game when we first got it – there are a lot of rules to learn. Once we got the hang of it though we were HOOKED on this game and love to play it – the whole family. It wouldn’t be good for younger kids – they wouldn’t understand the concepts or have the patience for such a long game. I would say maybe 10-12 years of age and up would be best.

The game is simple in it’s concept – build your cities and villages and roads, trade for what you need with neighbors, avoid attacks by the bad guys, but the different ways you can do it are very complex. We love that each time you play you can build the game board completely differently so that it’s never exactly the same game when you play, and when you add the game additions it really expands the ways you can play. Playing an entire game can be quite lengthy – our family has spent up to 2 hours playing before (that’s with 4 people playing on a very large board), but it’s easy to get very involved in the game so you don’t notice the time passing.

This game has become a staple for our family game-playing, every weekend we get in a least 1 game of Catan and sometimes more than that.
I love this game, and so does my wife, and our neighbors always come over to play.