The Tao of Gaming

... discovers Settlers of Catan. Interesting article, mainly for unit numbers and a few anecdotes and the fact that I can apply to be a professor of boardgames at Curtin University of Technology in Perth. (To be fair, its taken me two months to notice this article).

Among the facts given:

• Rio Grande games sold over half a million units last year (of all titles), and claims growth of 30-35%.
• Settlers has sold 15 million copies so far.
• Settlers sold 600k copies in the US last year, up from 450k.

I dispute, however, the statement that the Settlers of Catan novel is "a must have for [siedlers] legion of fans."

[H/T] Newmark's Door

(Two new games in two days...its almost like I'm a gamer).

Basically scrabble with symbols. Clever, but I prefer Scrabble with words. Still, a nice change of pace and worth trying a few times.

The plus side is that this can be played with children (My youngest can read, but certainly can't build words from a random handful of letters).

I finally played it and it's an evolutionary upgrade to Vinci. Simpler base rules; I don't mind hidden VPs (in theory we could track them, but nobody does), no problem with fixed # of turns, although perhaps 1-2 more turns might be nice. Nicely compressed.

But my instinct proclaims that smoothing the hard edges made Small World ... not worse exactly, but flighty. Superfluous. Neutered. Is it really better to have everyone pounding on the perceived leader, rather than the actual leader? Halving cost to skip over a civilization makes diving deep for a good combo easier, not a gut wrenching choice. With scores so close, did my plan matter, or did I roll slightly better/worse later on? (Early luck tends to be corrected by the group, assuming they judge the leaderboard accurately).

On one hand, Small World feels like a denser Vinci. But I feel a disconnect between playing well and winning. [One other player commented that all the games our group has played have typically had 2-3 points between each player, and our game was 89-87-85-83]. This is just a gut feeling, but one that I never felt with Vinci.

I like the reduced gametime, but wonder if it's at the cost of gameplay. In some sense, that's silly, since the games are nearly identical. But with only 9 turns you have the first turn and last turn (both somewhat odd in that you can't hit other players effectively) and 1-2 declining turns, you really only have 5-6 'full' turns. Imagine chess as all opening and endgame, but with the same rules. Again, I'm overstating it ...

I can't explain this yet. I didn't dislike Small World, but ...