Thanks to an article on Wired.com about great geek gifts, I came across the game Settlers of Catan. I’d never heard of the game or even tried it, but after asking a few friends about it, I discovered that a small group of friends play the game on most Fridays. I went. I played. And now I’m hooked.
The premise of the game is that each player is a settler of an island called Catan. The island is composed of hexes which can produce one of five types of resources: lumber, woold, brick, ore, and wheat. Because the hexes are laid out randomly each game, you’ll never encounter the same game board twice. The players build towns, cities, and roads between the hexes of the island in an attempt to gain 10 victory points before their opponents can.
The best part about the game is that it is elegantly simple, and it is the most well balanced and strategically diverse game I’ve yet to encounter. The only flaw is that the board game needs at least three players. Thankfully a version of Catan can be downloaded from XBLA for 800 credits.
AI Opponents
As with most games, the computer AI is the biggest frustration of the game. There are several AI opponents available to play against on either easy, medium, or hard difficulty settings. However, the difficulty seems to only influence how an AI opponent will trade resources with you. On easy, the opponents will make almost any trade, no matter how absurd (e.g. it most likely will give you 2 bricks and 2 lumber for one 1 wheat in return); on medium the trading is a bit more realistic; on hard the AI opponents will refuse to trade with you once you’re in the lead, but will freely trade with each other.
The oversight here is that the developers haven’t taken the time to make the computer opponents consider each other opponents. The hardest AI setting is equivalent to playing 3 on 1. It might work better if you could select the AI level of each individual opponent.
Game Achievements
There are a decent number of achievements to unlock, such as completing ten games with control of the Longest Road card or the Largest Army card. But clever achievements don’t exist, such as end ten games with control of the Longest Road card AND the Largest Army card, win 10 games against easy AI opponents, win 10 games against medium AI opponents, etc., Steal 15 resources in one game with the robber. Collect ten victory points without building additional towns (you may only upgrade to cities or build roads).
Online Play
You can play up to three opponents online in either casual or ranked games. None of the online aspects are amazing, but the experience is okay. The nicest part is that if an opponent drops from the game, he or she is replaced by an AI opponent. However, I’m not sure how this affects your ranking in matched games if you defeat an AI opponent that has replaced a dropped player though.
Problems
As with most games these days, no one has taken in to account that you might be playing on a non-HD tv. For instance, on my television it is almost impossible to tell what the dice roll is, because the numbers on the dice are approximately one pixel across. It is damn irritating, and there is no excuse for it. I’m presuming this only happens on non-HD tvs, but it might happen on HDs too.
Second, in each game you can keep track of different stats, such as number of dice rolled, resources collected, the distribution of the dice rolls, how various points have been collected or lost, etc… except the on-screen display offers no legend for the icons used to indicate each stat. You can figure it out on your own, but it isn’t something you should be asked to do. It would be great if you could see accumulated stats for all of the games you’ve played. Also, the columns on the displays don’t all line up and some labels over-lap on to each other.
Overall: A decent game, but if you’ve never played the board game, then you probably won’t enjoy the XBLA version.
Good: The game is true to every aspect of the board game, and I find myself playing at least once a day.
Bad: Poor AI, lack of quality/creative achievements, and programming negligence (lack of legends on certain screens)
Score: 3/5 (decent)
Popularity: 2% [?]
