Catan

I used to play Catan a ton with my family when I was younger, but it’d been many years since my last Catan game when I played it this past Wednesday. To me, the key component of the Catan experience is the resource acquisition system. I feel like the classic loop in most turn based games is one where good things happen to you on your turn, and bad things happen to you on other people’s turns (or good things just happen to them only). However in Catan, each dice roll gives everyone in the game new resources, meaning everyone can celebrate a good roll together. This creates a sense of camaraderie and fellowship that would be entirely absent if people got resources separately. Combined with the trading, even if you yourself don’t get any new resources on one turn, you can be happy because players might have new resources to trade to you. Resource gathering isn’t zero-sum: one person getting more resources doesn’t mean anyone else gets any fewer. In a way, each turn in Catan is a tiny communal celebration as all the players advance a little bit through the game. Literarily, this perhaps converts for a moment what is usually a person vs. person game into one of person vs. nature, with the players all one one team against the dice.

I think Catan might partially be successful because of how it blends different modes of play. Especially as the game begins, the game which is theoretically competitive is mostly just comprised of parallel play. Everyone builds up resources with very minimal interaction, and mutually beneficial trades turn the game into mostly a coop experience. This lack of interaction can serve as a calm onramp for new players, who in another game might be thrown directly into competition and be immediately destroyed by more experienced players. The permanent nature of the game also helps level out skill differences. Sure, each player can do a lot better or worse, but theres no capturing, no destroying other people’s stuff, only really a single way to harm other players at all (the robber) other than just expanding where they might have wanted to expand. So even with the largest skill gaps, everyone will be able to keep playing until the end with minimal interference from much stronger enemies.  This type of “parallel play in a shared game world” is common to a lot of board games and I maybe only really think of it as unique because I’m used to video games which tend towards more fast-paced and directly competitive modes (the reading says that this is specific to eurogames which was an interesting distinction that I hadn’t heard of before).

I like how much depth it feels like the economy has, despite the fact that its just 5 different resource cards. I think because there are so many different trading systems (bank, 2:1 ports, 3:1 ports, other players), monopolizing a resource or finding a good trading system in the context of your specific economic situation feels really satisfying.

The calm, almost co-op nature does have some downsides. It’s easy to feel as though all has already been lost, and you are mostly just waiting around until your much farther ahead opponent finally wins. The mechanic of placing two towns for free is a good way to kickstart the game into a decent pace, but also makes it easy for players to be trapped into a starting position that they might have no hope of coming back from (one that might have been at least partially decided by the random placement order). This definitely isn’t a problem for the sort of social board game that Catan is, but the mode of “nobody ever loses until the end” can sort of trap you, especially with no comeback mechanics.