I played the standard edition Catan in a group of four, with varying experience levels across everyone. This was my first time ever playing, while two of the four had played a few times before and one of them had quite a bit of experience. Despite not winning the round we played, I still had a ton of fun and found myself wanting to play more.
Before we began, we spent about twenty minutes or so going over the rules and procedures of the game, a lot of which went over my head at the time due to the sheer amount of things I felt like I needed to know/keep track of. We then set the game board as shown on the Starting Map for Beginners in the rule book and got started.
What Thurm mentioned in the reading “Avidly Reads Board Games” about his first game experience feeling like learning a new language really resonated with me with how it resembled my experience. I started off pretty confused, but with at least a basic understanding of the things I should do during my turn: roll the dice, look at what resources I would need to build settlements and try to trade accordingly, and build whatever settlements or roads that I can. With this being my focus, I forgot about the value of development cards, pretty much ignoring them completely, and focused on getting resources and expanding my settlements and roads. Similarly to Thurm, I remember thinking to myself that the game initially felt similar to Monopoly, with the settlements and cities mirroring the houses and hotels of Monopoly. I figured if I could just keep trying cover the most amount of ground possible with my settlements and “monopolize” the land (lol), I’d eventually reach 10 victory points. I also ended up falling in the trap of wanting to pursue the “Longest Road” card like Thurm — but in retrospect, remembering now that the one experienced player was the one who explained the rules, I wonder if they purposefully made that card seem enticing to have any of us fall for the trap of trying to pursue it.
As we got further into the game and I got more familiar with the mechanics of the game, it really did feel like we all got immersed into the “magic circle” created by Catan. It no longer felt like Monopoly, and it began to take its own unique shape and experience. I remember the rolling of 7’s inciting a simultaneous groan from all of the players, the reveals of certain development cards that created a ton of excitement and equal amount of frustration across the group, and just feeling lost in it all, making me forget about my daily responsibilities and life stresses. Through it all, it made me feel a lot closer to the people I played the game with.
The only thing I might want to change about the game is the winning condition. Perhaps this was just this particular experience, and this experience being my one and only time ever playing Catan, but it took a long time for any of us to even reach 7 points. This was when one of the players had to leave, so we did not end up finishing the game with a clear winner. Again, I’m not sure if this is by design, or if we just happened to take a long time given the varying levels of experience, or if it was a combination of both, but it did feel like it was dragging on perhaps a bit more than necessary towards the end. But overall, I really enjoyed the process of learning how to play the game and the level of immersion I felt as I got deeper into the game, and I definitely see myself playing Catan again in the future!
It is interesting that you felt like the game was dragging on for a long time and that you were not able to reach the end of the game. It’s possible that your game was slower than usual if you had many inexperienced players. I personally have a pretty good amount of experience playing Catan, but I also noticed that my games seemed to take a long time to finish. I think that I may have perceived my games to be slow-going because I had been mostly playing online for a while and hadn’t played with a real-life board in a long time. It was strange to realize how much slower it felt to play with a real-life board after becoming so used to the automation that the online version provides.
Catan also felt like learning a new language to me. Though I played it virtually, all the rules were pretty much the same and we had no one who was experienced enough to explain it to us, so we were pretty much confused most of the time too. I like how you mentioned the ‘longest road’ sounding enticing but possibly purposefully — like a trap — cause I definitely considered it for a while too. It was immersive for a while, but I agree with the fact that even getting to like 5 victory points took really long, but that was probably cause it was all of our first time’s playing.