I once read an article somewhere about how he spent huge amounts of time thoroughly playtesting the entire game with his children. This is what made the game balanced and easy to grasp.
My favorite mechanic is the way each dice roll potentially gives everyone at the table some sort of payoff. This keeps everyone at the table engaged and paying attention.
You only come up with mechanics like this if you put in the time playtesting.
> My favorite mechanic is the way each dice roll potentially gives everyone at the table some sort of payoff. This keeps everyone at the table engaged and paying attention.
We've actually found this to be very off-putting. It often ends up with certain players remaining stuck in long droughts, often unable to do anything.
As a result, we tend to play with "welfare". Essentially, a secondary currency system that can be exchanged for any resource. Cost scales with the amount of victory points you have, so it becomes less valuable as you advanced closer to victory.
We've found this helps create a bit of balance and ensure that everyone has a chance to stay engaged.
This is indeed frustrating, and it's the reason that when I play with newer players I strongly recommend to them not to place their 2 initial settlements on the same numbers!
If you put those initial settlements on 2 intersections that happen to restrict you to only rolls of 3, 6, and 9 you're in for a world of hurt even though 6 and 9 aren't "bad" numbers per se.
I used to play a lot of Catan and loved the game but then stopped for a few years over COVID (while I played other games online). When I tried it again, that's when I noticed this "drought" problem more obviously. (But that's just a niggle in an otherwise great game!)
> We've actually found this to be very off-putting. It often ends up with certain players remaining stuck in long droughts, often unable to do anything.
same here. There were (online/zoom) games where I spent like 15~20 minutes on twitter, and just clicking 'roll' on my turn because I could never do anything
I prefer ticket-to-ride, where I can always buy a card or two, and always (after buying enough), put some trains on the board.
Interesting. I never considered this. Looked it up and found specific rules and an interesting discussion on BoardGameGeek. Well worth reading, especially if you are an advanced player:
It seems like if you have a good memory, you could be a lot more strategic with the robber when doing this (assuming you mean a deck of 36 cards, you know that a recently drawn "roll" won't come up until the next reshuffle).
While dice rolls follow predictable distribution, in aggregate, they do not do so in the micro environment. You can end up on droughts on "statistically common" numbers.
We've found this is further compounded by the fact that some resources will naturally end up with poor numbers on them. You might have a game where there's only one good "brick" hex, but two people have commandeered it. That resource becomes so valuable, that you can never acquire it.
While you can technically trade to the bank, the 7 rule means it's hard to acquire enough cards to make the trade.
It needs a unfair-fair dice, as is used for random in many games. True random can produce really unfair results, so in any game there is a counter in the background, counting "misses" and gives you a win every third or fourth dice roll. That way it feels more "fair".
Not just with his family. He actually wrote himself an AI with some 60 page Excel monster which could play the game quite well. I worked with him for a short time around end of the nineties and he was incredibly dedicated to his game. He experimented a lot with different game scenarios, for example there is a quite fun Catan card game out there. And he came up with a bunch of scenarios for the PC game we were doing back then. He was also was a super friendly, down to earth person who showed up at game fairs talking to his player base.
> My favorite mechanic is the way each dice roll potentially gives everyone at the table some sort of payoff. This keeps everyone at the table engaged and paying attention.
I find the variance here way too high. Coupled with being a long game, this essentially bums out a few of the players who end up missing out in resources in early or mid-game and then just stagnating and getting bored. When I'm forced to play the game, I've played by taking the average of a set of dice rolls (essentially shaping your result into a distribution that approaches normal as you have more rolls) but honestly I just don't bother playing Catan when given the choice.
I certainly credit Catan for being my cohort's gateway into the world of board games, a lifelong hobby, and for that Mr. Teuber has my eternal gratitude.
And here I thought _I_ was an elitest for looking down at the Parker Bros. catalog et al from the Catanian peaks. I guess maybe I'm not so sophisticated after all ;)
Not OP but I'm very fond of Bang!, the card based version not the dice version though. And now that I'm reading the Wikipedia page I'm seeing there's actually multiple options for playing online, which is great because all my friends hate it haha. Very cool. No sleep for me tonight :)
I love Carcassonne but I've found I like it even better if you add the house rule of having a hand of 3 tiles, which allows a bit more strategy and planning.
I’ve played both ways and while I liked the 3 tile hand initially, I found that I preferred the single tile variant, at least for Hunters and Gatherers,
Incidentally, boardgamearena supports both single-tile and three-tile hands,
Splendor. It's easy to teach but hard to master. Someone who has played a lot of Splendor will handily beat a noob. It has very little luck but enough luck through player ordering of choices that the game doesn't become a stale abstract where you have to memorize optimal strategies. The theme in the game makes a lot of sense and helps guide players' intuition on what actions they want to take.
If you are asking for possibly harder/more complex games, I would suggest Eldritch Horror (coop) or Dead Of Winter. For other great games that are still very newbie friendly: Ticket To Ride, Splendor, Azul, Imhotep (iirc).
All those you always have something to do, which is my main gripe with Catan, where some games can be A LOT of fun, and some others, you would rather be watching paint dry.
Thank you for the recs! I think I'll have to check out dead of winter.
I think after some reflection I know what you mean about the variance of "stuff to do" from game to game in Catan. We don't play much anymore, as I prefer asymmetry, but I have such fond memories of it, I was just curious.
I'm also not the person you were replying to, but I wanted to add: if you like Catan, it's definitely worth having a look at the modern board game ecosystem, because Catan kick-started a huge revolution in board game design that is only starting to slow down now.
Of the classic "gateway" games, I personally would recommend Ticket to Ride or Carcassonne. The former is about collecting cards of the right colour in order to build rail lines across America (or Europe or various other countries), while hoping nobody else tries to get in your way. Carcassonne is a tile laying game where you're trying to build and claim features in a pastoral medieval landscape, which feels like it should be pleasant but can be brutal!
If you want to see how good board games can look, I personally really like Wingspan. It's a game of collecting birds, and includes a huge stack of cards, each of which is a different, beautifully illustrated bird with unique features that relate to the bird's real life traits. It's a bit more complicated than some of the other games here, but also very satisfying when you can figure out how to fit all your bird powers together and create something very powerful.
The other thing I'd recommend is not so much a game as a mechanic, and that's deck building games. The idea is that you start each game with a small deck of cards and play them. Playing the cards generally allows you to buy more cards which you then eventually shuffle into your deck, making your deck stronger over time. I really like these sorts of games because you have such a satisfying feeling of building up cards that work well together and then playing them in a single giant combo.
Dominion is the oldest, and probably the best example of deckbuilding, it's very simple conceptually, but it's very deep, and you can also play it for free online if you want to try it out. There's lots of other variations on this theme though, and I've heard good things about Clank! where you're simultaneously trying to build your deck and sneak through a dragon's lair. If you are a fan of Harry Potter, there's also a Harry Potter deckbuilding game where the players are working together rather than competing, which is really well tutorialised.
Speaking of cooperative games, this is another genre that I didn't really think about before getting into board games. There are a lot of games here depending on what you're into, but Pandemic is a good starting point: you're working together to cure four diseases that are infecting the globe, you need to simultaneously be clearing up infected regions, but also researching cures so you can win the game. It's fun, thematic, and very tense. Alternatively, if you like puzzles, card games, and tense silence, The Crew is a very simple trick-taking card game where you're working together with the other players, but you're not allowed to talk to each other, so the only way you can communicate is by the cards you put down. If you're used to card games, it'll click very quickly, but even if you aren't, the concept is fairly intuitive.
There are a whole bunch of other games that I want to mention but I've already written a long enough comment! I think the best way to get into board games is to try a few games out and see what works for you and what doesn't. There are people out there who exclusively play intense simulations of 1800s rail stock exchanges, and people who just want to place pretty tiles in the right places; there is really something for everyone! If you want more places to try out games, you can often play virtually with tools like Tabletop Simulator or Boardgame Arena, or sometimes there's a local library or board game group or game shop where you can try before you buy.
Oof, I am definitely an "eyes bigger than stomach" game hoarder. I think about 30 percent of my collection is still shrink wrapped and stored in garage bound totes.
The famous and much maligned, but actually good game, Monopoly of course has the characteristic that the best stuff happens to you on opponents' turns. It's a great characteristic for a lot of groups.
It's also a fairly rare characteristic despite two of the largest tabletop games
ever, Catan and Monopoly, having versions of it.
Machi Koro is an excellent more modern game with the same characteristic.
The game is very poorly balanced for current standards. If you choose the start location poorly you automatically lose.
Then due to the 'robber' mechanic you cannot follow any strategy, since you randomly lose resources.
To add more: trade is almost never worth it. I think some expansion introduced small currency coins to try to facilitate more trade.
After 2-3 hours the game ends since somoene managed to buy the cards that give victory points. This didnt happen due to any grand strategy, they were just lucky not to lose their resources to the robber.
Those cards are a built in timer.
Cathan could have been good in 1995, but now mechanically the game is very outdated and there are much better 'gateway' games. For example Carcassonne, which has very elegant mechanics.
Cathan has this problem that your decision options are very limited: trade is often worth it only for one side - so the common strategy is to never trade; then you cannot do any long term strategy, since if you try to accumulate resources you randomly lose them to the robber.
> If you choose the start location poorly you automatically lose.
Yes, if you play badly initially it effects your entire game and you'll probably lose but I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that is true for a lot of games.
Catan is an excellent game; it's nicely balanced between luck, persuasion when it comes to trading, territorial maneuvering, resource acquisition, and so on …
My favorite mechanic is the way each dice roll potentially gives everyone at the table some sort of payoff. This keeps everyone at the table engaged and paying attention.
You only come up with mechanics like this if you put in the time playtesting.
[*] RIP