The Settlers of Catan (beware, some pics)

[Skybird]

I learned last week, that my most favourite social boardgame (which can also see emotions turn quite anti-social ), "Die Siedler von Catan", has been successfully translocated from the German-languaged European market to the United States as well. Over here, the voted "Best boardgame of 1995" is easily the most successful boardgame of the past 15 years. It saw several upgrade packages, a PC conversion in 2001, and is still so successful and asked for that two years ago they released again a completely new PC and Mac version of the game, with much improved AI and including the two most wanted upgrade sets as well, "The Seafarer" and "Cities & Knights".

http://www.catan.com/

You can choose the "Play Catan" tab and then choose to play the basic rules versions as a free browser game, to get an idea of what it is about. You can play it online, and you can try the trial version or buy the full PC version allowing to play the full package on your PC.

http://www.catan.com/gamerules.html

A brief summary of the game's principles can be found here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Settlers_of_Catan

Settlers was one of the first German-style board games to achieve popularity outside Europe, and has been called the killer app of the genre. Over 15 million games in the Catan series have been sold, and the game has been translated into thirty languages from the original German.

If you are looking for a social boardgame of extremly good gaming quality and 3-4 players 3-4 (with addon sets 3-6), try this one, no matter whether you go for the biardghame itself, or the PC version if that is for you. You can also try the free brwoser version against 2 virtual opponents , or chose to play online (their are tournament events for both online and boardgame versions).

There have been several addons and supplementations to Catan, and variations of the original theme. I always recommend to go for three: the Basic Game, Cities and Knights, and Seafarer. These three combined gives me the best Catan experience I could wish for.

Sometime ago I also saw a Catan interface done by a third party which is meant for network play between human players, and runs under the GNU licence project - it is all free. It's called "Sea3D".

http://www.chip.de/downloads/Sea3D_13014875.html

Finally there is this fella who started to build his own real 3D miniature world for Catan - nice!

http://www.siedeln.de/phpBB/ltopic,9109,0,asc,0.html









Let's settle down!