More on Settlers of Catan and Klaus Teuber

[thewayne]

I knew Ars Technica would have a write-up on the passing of Klaus and how much Catan means around the world.

Monopoly is/was held as a pinnacle of board games. I hate it with a deep and abiding loathing reserved for things that I deeply and abidingly loathe. It is a horrible game. This article quotes a statistic that says the average Monopoly set is played ONE POINT FIVE TIMES. Now THAT is a truly horrible game! It isn't FUN because you're constantly getting screwed, people are eliminated one by one. It is a runaway winner game: once someone gets certain properties and has hotels on them, game over.

There are house rules that can slow this down, but the progression is largely going to be the same.

Catan, and other games like it, brought cooperation into competitive board games. And you can feel like you're in the running until the very end, so you have a reason to pay attention to what's going on. In the case of Catan, you are encouraged to cooperate and trade resources with others in order to complete your personal goals. The infamous "I have wood for sheep" became a part of gaming vernacular because of Catan, in this case, someone wanting to trade wood for needed sheep.

I didn't hate Monopoly when I was young, but I never liked it. It just wasn't fun. Now, this was back in the '60s and '70s, Euro Games hadn't really been invented yet and we were stuck with what we had. As I grew older and experienced a wider panoply of games, I saw the flaws for what they were: eliminating players/zero-sum, and runaway leaders. And now, I don't know of any games that I own that have these characteristics. When I get a game like Monopoly, or someone gives me a set, I harvest the money and the pawns and consider keeping the board, all for repurposing for game designs that I work on. It never gets played.

Last year my middle niece got married, and their registry asked for board games. I looked at that list and said 'Nope, no way. They're getting some QUALITY intro board games from me!' And among them, I gave them Carcasonne, a brilliant tile-laying game about building castles and towns in medieval France. Every game is completely different, you play to the end and it's a lot of fun. You score points every turn, which helps you feel like you're accomplishing something. My nieces, sister, and parents already had a lot of experience playing Quirkle, a color/shape tile-laying game, where, again, you score points every turn and there are a couple of twists that can really boost your score! AND you draw tiles from a bag, which is cool.

Now, Catan itself, I'm not a huge fan of. Perhaps if I played it more some of the deeper strategies would sink in and I'd do better at it. But it's a good enough game and I have a couple of copies including some expansions that I bought when game stores went out of business. But socially, an infinitely better game than Monopoly. Everyone participates, even when it's not your turn: while only the turning player can make trades, you might have extra sheep you can offer up and better your own position while helping someone else.

Even if I'm not a huge fan of it, Catan is a great game and well worth people's time. It is not hideously complex, and it's a fast game to learn and play, it typically finishes in about an hour. When was the last time you were able to play multiple games of Monopoly in an evening and enjoy it?

RIP, Klaus. Ya done good and made a huge number of people happy.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/04/klaus-teuber-made-catan-and-it-changed-the-worlds-expectations-for-board-games/

The comments on this Ars article are excellent and a recommended read. You really get a feeling for how many people his game touched.

And one last comment. While Klaus did a great job, he is just one of the great game designers out there. Reiner Knitzia is right up there with an insane number of games to his credit, as is Friedman Frisch with the great game Power Grid. Both win awards. There are far more out there than I'll ever be able to name.

Comments

[disneydream06]

Now that you say it, that does pretty much describe Monopoly. :o :o :o
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

Sadly, for one of the best-selling games in the world, it is not a very good game.

[disneydream06]

I wonder how many people like me are buying them nowadays as a collector's item and not a game to play?

[thewayne]

I would expect that Hasbro also knows that average number of times played = 1.5  They sell tons of the collectible and licensed versions, no doubt there.

[disneydream06]

Well, I am sure my family will have a blast getting rid of all the stuff I have "collected". LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!

[bibliofile]

I still like that it was developed to critique capitalism, though my family used it to learn capitalism without the critique part.

[ndrosen]

Did you know that Monopoly is a prettied-up version of The Landlords’ Game, originally invented by a reformer named Elizabeth Magee Phillips to illustrate the economic ideas of Henry George?

The Landlords’ Game had two sets of rules, one pretty much like Monopoly, and one with land value taxation and the abolition of other taxes, so that all players could prosper; the second set of rules, I have heard, did not make for a game of much interest.

By the way, I was an enthusiastic Monopoly player as child, years before I read Henry George.

[thewayne]

I did know that.  Some day I may get around to looking up the patent and seeing what the original rules look like, assuming the patent has been preserved as a PDF.

[captainsblog]

The irony of Monopoly is that the IP rights owners didn't prevent the name from becoming generic, resulting in the name going into the public domain in 1983; and you cannot patent or trademark the basic IDEA of a board game such as pieces moving round by dice throws. So now the stores are full of YOURCITYNAMEopoly and YOURTEAMopoly that they can do nothing about.

We haven't played in years, but I still have the board from my teens, with the contents of this 1970s National Lampoon spoof all safely guarded inside with the title deeds, houses and hotels:

https://nothstine.blogspot.com/2010/12/p3-crime-week-concludes-joys-of-real.html

I even have the paste-on and rule component he mentions:





There have been some other references to the "Landlord's Game" and its progeny, so I will probably get round to a post about that history and this inspired spoof of it.

[moxie_man]

Not a fan of Monopoly. Now, Nuclear War card game and the expansion sets for it, that's a fun game. Rarely does anyone win the game (who would really survive the destruction of the planet by all out nuclear war???). It's such a silly, fun game despite that. This past winter, we even got my father to join in a game of it. Sadly, I don't think it's still in print as company behind it, Flying Buffalo, went belly up after the inventor/owner died a few years back.

[thewayne]

The company isn't dead, per se.  I used to work there as did many of my friends and went to many conventions with the founder, Rick Loomis.  After he died, his sisters inherited the company.  While they enjoyed games, they didn't have the drive that Rick did, and were equally aged.  They did the smart thing and sold it to Web Sphere.  My understanding is that everything will go back into production, but who knows what the time scale will be.  The http://www.flyingbuffalo.com web site is still up, though heavily revised from Rick's days - which it really needed.  It shows everything being out of stock, I'm not sure what to make of that.

[moxie_man]

Well, I hope that's potentially good news. I didn't know (or maybe I forgot) that you worked there in the past.

By the way, I need change for 10 million...

[thewayne]

Yep, my first computer job was doing data entry at Flying Buffalo!  It was a fun place for an intro job. I know where my sets are, do you need a five and singles or just singles? ;-)

[moxie_man]

Singles. That way if that pesky top secret card comes-up that let's someone else steal one of my population cards at random, I increase the chance of minimizing the damage to my Gene Pool.

[thewayne]

Excellent tactic, that!

[silveradept]

Given the origins of Monopoly, the fact that everyone finds it a tiresome and boring game is pretty intentional - it's meant to be a capitalist's kind of game, and capitalism has a lot of very unfair things involved in it. I forget where it is on the Internet, but it's probably mixed in with the history of the Landlord's Game that Monopoly derives itself from, where someone details the most effective method to make people never want to play Monopoly ever again and realize what kind of awful game it (and capitalism) is. Basically, insist on playing the rules as written, including auctioning properties if not paid for at the list price, always stop at four houses without developing the hotel, so as to make sure that the housing supply never replenishes itself, and then watch as your opponents can't do anything (because the rules forbid adding houses to the supply) and eventually either table flip, rage quit, or are swiftly divested of their money because the only thing they can do with it is pay the person who has the developed properties who chooses to play the game in the most capitalist-monopolist-exploitative way possible, all while staying comfortably within the rules of the game as written.

Catan's major flaw is the endgame portion of it. With the exception of victory points in development cards, it's very easy to see who is ahead and who is behind, and that generally means that a player who is ahead suddenly finds themselves excluded from the trade parts of the game, and must wait for either good dice rolls or development cards to push themselves over the top of the victory line. Getting the Last Lousy Point when you're playing against three other players is excruciating, especially when everyone is one or two points away and so nobody wants to trade for fear of giving someone exactly what thy need to achieve victory. Later editions, like the Star Trek variation of Catan, that adopt role cards, make the endgame much easier to navigate by making bad dice rolls still potentially profitable and allowing for a character to accumulate what they need to win by themselves much more easily. I would have hoped that role cards would have been ported back to the base game, as they are a clear improvement, but I don't think that's happened yet.

[thewayne]

Piggy-backing off another discussion with Ysbette Wordsmith, critical thinking is a major flaw in our current society.  I certainly didn't think about the more abstract lessons that could be learned from Monopoly as a kid, I just recognized that the game went downhill fast.  It isn't remotely marketed as an educational game, just as 'good family entertainment'.  So sadly the lessons it could teach are largely ignored and lost. I never played any of the themed versions of Catan, like ST.  Sounds like it could be interesting.  It makes me think of the ST version of Castle Panic, which is tremendous fun.  The theme really (mind) melded well with the original, we've had lots of fun playing that.

[silveradept]

The ages at which someone plays Monopoly are generally too young to get into the critique of monopolism and capitalism, and by the time that the critiques would be useful, everyone has already figured out the game is terrible and doesn't want to play it. If we played it with the alternate rule set that was cooperative, that might help keep it relevant enough to see how the game becomes terrible when you play by the monopolist's rules.

My board game childhood included Payday (where we learned about the compounding of interest and the ruinous effects of loans) Careers (which I could rarely win because I couldn't predict which of the three major resources I would have an abundance of and which I would never get enough of, and Go For Broke, a game that was about trying to shed all your money on a world that wanted to give you all the money that it could. It was fun to try and have to get rid of resources rather than hoard them.

[thewayne]

That Go For Broke sounds amusing, sort of Brewster's Millions: The Board Game.

[silveradept]

Yes, you lose the money doing things like playing the stock market, roulette wheels, or betting on horse races that can just as easily give you big payouts if you're unlucky. So it would probably be within the rules of Brewster's Millions.