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× Talk about whatever you like related to games that doesn't fit anywhere else.

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02 Mar 2022 23:35 #331229 by QPCloudy
I had the same experience with the Nightfall card game years ago. A buddy got like, everything available for it on sale and brought it to my other buddy's place. I had NO idea what the fuck was going one. However, I somehow destroyed everyone else and never knew how or why.

Shellhead wrote: I'm not suggesting that Settlers of Catan became a bad game. I'm saying it was never a good game. I played once and I won and then I was done with it, because it's a bad game. The BGGer that I quoted just took longer to realize it than I did. And don't bore me with ratings or sales figures. White Castle sells plenty of onion-flavored hamburgers and nobody will ever mistake it for Michelin-rated restaurant. Popularity is not the same as quality.

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03 Mar 2022 05:24 #331233 by Erik Twice

Jexik wrote: I’m oddly tilted by the bad Catan take on dicebreaker that’s making the rounds on Twitter.

In the end, I think it all comes down to not trading. It's not surprising the author doesn't enjoy the game or that it takes her groups hours to finish because it seems they refuse to trade even when it benefits them:

However, players can simply decline any trade offer they don’t want, leaving other players who don’t have any way of accessing a resource floundering in the water.

Of course, players can always attempt to build a settlement at one of the map’s ports, allowing them to trade a resource they do have for one they don’t. But depending on where players have situated themselves on the map, there might be no feasible way for them to ever reach any of those ports.


It's no surprise a trading game isn't very good if people don't trade. And, obviously, if nobody trades then the starting position is everything.

That said, it's pretty common. You can easily find people on BGG or in real life who think trading doesn't work or that it's a popularity contest. Sometimes people refuse to trade because, obviously, it helps their opponents and nothing that helps their opponents can ever be a good move. I don't know, I just think gamers have fairly strange ideas about how social skills work in games. Same with bluffing.
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03 Mar 2022 08:16 #331235 by Legomancer
I still love Catan, even though nobody plays it anymore. I think it's interesting that it's considered a gateway game because it does so many things that are extremely weird to people not used to these types of games:
1) things happen when it's not your turn. not only do you get stuff, you can lose stuff, and you can trade.
2) there are spaces, but you don't play in them, you play around them. The idea of seeing a "Brick" space on the board but claiming a vertex instead of the space is odd.
3) There are points, but they aren't immediately obvious and some can be hidden. There's a score, but no score track.
4) Trading. You guys have been talking about that already. It's an odd thing, this idea that you're going to "help" your opponent. (Not trading is, imo, akin to all the house rules and ignored rules people use in Monopoly, all of which make that awful game even worse.)
5) You roll dice but nothing moves. Both of these things are odd to newcomers. Apart from Yahtzee, dice usually indicate movement. And when there's a board and pieces, things usually move around it instead of being static.

That's a lot of new ideas to throw at someone at once! And yet it seems to work.
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03 Mar 2022 09:03 #331239 by dysjunct
Good point, Lego. I think it comes down to the coherence of the theme. You make things, you trade them, you build things. Rinse, repeat. That’s a thing people get.

(And trading, or more largely dealmaking, is something that happens in Monopoly and Risk when it’s not your turn. So I don’t think that is too weird.)

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03 Mar 2022 09:10 #331240 by RobertB
Maybe an evening of Bohnanza will loosen up those trading muscles. You can't win that game without trading.

I don't think "Nobody places Settlers anymore," is exactly correct. A couple Christmases ago I saw my daughter play game after game of Settlers online. Some on Discord with friends, and some random games. All the Settlers she could want.
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03 Mar 2022 09:44 #331242 by Msample
I think SETTLERS has sort of moved out of the hardore BGG crowd and into the non hardcore casual gamer crowd. There are people that think of themselves as boardgame enthusiasts and never graduate beyond SETLLERS, FLUXX, etc . I remember years ago being invited to a coworkers game night and it was FLUXX. God I hated that game. Yet he and the other members of his group seemed perfectly content with that and maybe a half dozen games in their repertoire. No Kallax shelves there for sure. At my family reunion a few years ago my cousins mentioned playing SETTLERS , and were dumbfounded when I told them of the vast sea of games beyond that. Basically the mass market stores like TARGET that carry games of that ilk have created in some ways a parallel / separate breed of gamer apart from the BGG crowd, something the latter have a hard time comprehending.
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03 Mar 2022 10:25 - 03 Mar 2022 13:12 #331246 by Sagrilarus
My wife (an avid quilter) made me a Settlers wall hanging that depicts the board in different colored fabrics. It's a bit abstract but if you've played the game you know what it is.

It's pretty doggone remarkable how many "non gamers" recognize it and indicate how much they admire the game. It is being played aplenty out there, just not by people who lurk on this kind of web site.
Last edit: 03 Mar 2022 13:12 by Sagrilarus.
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03 Mar 2022 10:39 #331249 by Msample
Going back to my cousins casual gaming hobby, I remember her mildly complaining how long it took to set up a game - I think it may have been SETTLERS, or if not, def something of that ilk/weight. I laughed and said "you have no idea how long some games can take to set up".

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03 Mar 2022 10:51 #331252 by Gregarius
One of the clearest sign of how old most of us are on this site is that everyone keeps calling it SETTLERS even though it was officially shortened to CATAN.

I still like it and try to play it in person at least once a year. I've been in unrelenting games that have lasted far too long, but most of them finish up pretty quickly. I think if you really wanted to demonstrate how trading should work, you should make new players play Pit first. That's just crazy trading chaos, has almost zero rules overhead, and takes about 10 minutes.

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03 Mar 2022 11:06 #331255 by Shellhead
Pit is a blast with at least six players. My grandparents had a bunch of family board games, including Pit, so I would play it with my cousins whenever we had a big family gathering there. Sometimes we got so loud that one of the adults in the next room would complain. We tried playing silent Pit, but somebody got poked in the eye.
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03 Mar 2022 14:12 #331263 by Rliyen

Shellhead wrote: Pit is a blast with at least six players. My grandparents had a bunch of family board games, including Pit, so I would play it with my cousins whenever we had a big family gathering there. Sometimes we got so loud that one of the adults in the next room would complain. We tried playing silent Pit, but somebody got poked in the eye.


Testify.

I absolutely loved this game. I enjoyed playing the game with the neighborhood kids back in the 80s, and the last time I played was over a decade ago with a group of friends. It still holds up and the raucous interaction warms the cockles of my middle aged heart.

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