The new thing in boardgaming

[undyingking]

Wired is that prestigious magazine of the technological elites, its finger firmly on the cutting edge of all things geeky and zeitgeisty, right?

Apparently there's a new boardgame called Settlers of Catan, which is "poised" to become popular in the US. "Along the way, it's teaching Americans that board games don't have to be either predictable fluff aimed at kids or competitive, hyperintellectual pastimes for eggheads. Through the complex, artful dance of algorithms and probabilities lurking at its core, Settlers manages to be effortlessly fun, intuitively enjoyable, and still intellectually rewarding, a potent combination that's changing the American idea of what a board game can be."

Who'd have thought it? Why have none of us ever heard of this game before -- why have the Germans been keeping it secret for the fourteen years since its launch? What will those fiendish foreigners come up with next?

Comments

[secretrebel.livejournal.com]

It probably is deja vu.

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Chortle!

The road to the mainstream is long, but I'm glad that the world is moving down it, albeit slowly. Hadn't heard of PlayCatan before, either, FWIW.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

From the article:

Spiel des Jahres prize—German board gaming's highest honor.
Winning some obscure German award may not sound impressive,

Obscure? Gosh, we are elitist, aren't we?

First time I've heard reference to "German-style", rather than Eurogames, as well. Ouch, out of a four page article, it feels like there's the equivalent of an entire page explaining the mechanics ("The robber appears on a 7, the likeliest outcome of two dice as any craps player can tell you").

And, after all the Monopoly bashing, they finally mention the important fact that... nobody plays it right! (I saw this explanation on Boardgame Geek):
Putting fines in the middle, and getting them back from Free Parking keeps money in the game, which makes it longer to play. If you use that unofficial variant, don't complain about the game length. And worse, it redistributes it randomly, which means an almost bankrupt player can be given an undeserved stay of execution.

I'm surprised that they're programming the AI for Settlers from a spreadsheet though. I'd have thought a self-teaching neural net was far easier to set up, and then the results could be extracted (if not understood!) to the final game. (See Tony Mitton's devilish Puerto Rico in Excel model.)

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

Wow, even the English Mayfair Games edition must be at least 12 years old...

[theo]

Siedler was launched at the Nurenbur Toy Fair in 1995 and published that summer. I am not sure when Mayfair first published the English language edition. It must have been before Janet Bromley pulled the plug on the company in January 1997. I remember that we found that the German edition outsold the English edition in the UK for the first few years.

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

Wired, the magazine about what would have been new and cool if we had written about it 10 years ago. This is much the point Andrew Orlowski makes about the new British edition of Why-Read in The Register.

[mr-malk.livejournal.com]

They're over-egging the pudding as well. Perfect game my arse! It's a good game, but as with most games, it gets boring after a while, even with added variants.

And Monopoly generally gets slated far more than it deserves. As well as the basic strategy and 2d6 statistics (plus the fact already pointed out that very few people play it according to the vanilla rules) there is a lot of negotiation that goes on in Monopoly. Where it falls down ultimately is when all players except the one(s) perceived as dominant come to the conclusion that they should never trade with anyone else under any circumstances.

Also, it's not always the youngest player that throws the game-ending tantrum!

Settlers...

[thecesspit.livejournal.com]

I suspect Wired doesn't realise how big the German (and generally European) game market actually is... okay there's a niche market, but games like Settlers have easily sold more copies than many hit movies and albums ever do.

I can mention Settlers as the sort of game I like and get recognition from at least 1/3rd of people.

Now professing a love for 1825...

[thecesspit.livejournal.com]

Yep, updated and split into 3 Units. I play it online, and would play it more often if I could find opponents. Here. I don't have the southern Unit (Unit 1) and am on the look out for a copy to complete my set.

Luckily I do have friends who are really into economic games, so we play 1856 (Upper Canada) relatively often.