What? I play regular Cataan with two people regularly and have no troubles. In some ways it can even be better at times because there’s more “breathing room” on the board.
I’ve played a bunch of the expansions but I have to recommend the original game as the best and most fun. The only expansion I’ve found interesting is just having more pieces to play with so the board is larger and accommodate more players / longer game. Sea farers was interesting for the concept of islands but again I prefer the original. Cities and knights I did not like at all - it just adds a lot of complications that bog down the fun without adding much of anything interesting (unless you get off on complicated strategy, which of course some people do). I did not play the space version altho my friend has and gave it a bad review. I’d love to try for myself though.
One note: make sure all the players have the same number of pieces - since players have to stop building when they run out, it’s not fair if one player starts out with more pieces. I’m not sure if our set started out uneven, or if we lost some pieces along the way, but either could affect you too.
You’re supposed to have 15 roads, 5 settlements, and 4 cities (and 15 ships in Seafarers, and 3 city walls and 2 knights of each of levels 1,2,&3 in Cities and Knights).
The key gameplay element in Catan is trading. It’s what wins and loses games. In a two player game any trade you make will have some advantage for your only opponent therefore it is in your interest not to trade. That reduces the game to sheer randomness and that’s why two player Settlers of Catan is a bad thing.
My bigger problem with playing the game with two players is that, in Catan, success is exponential. With 3 or more players, the trailing the players may teamup to stop the lead player. With 2 players, the player with the early lead is just going to get further and further ahead.
We may have to agree to disagree then lol. It wouldn’t be quite as fun, but i could imagine playing Cataan without trading (there’s still bank trading after all) - there’s a lot more to the game than that and I don’t find that it’s much more than an occasional convenience, otherwise I’d be playing a card game, not a building board game. I don’t see that ultimately trading in a 3 player game is fundamentally different from in a 2 player game.
If card trading is the only strategy you are using playing this game, you are missing out. There’s a lot more to it!
I never said there wasn’t more to the game but trading is king in Settlers. You have to gather resources to succeed and presumably all players will select locations and construction for their optimal resource gathering. Therefore you can assume that all players will achieve a similar amount of resources throughout the game. The only way to increase the value of that is to trade with another player. Both players will feel that they are increasing the value of their hand by doing this while leaving other players in the game out.
With two players it’s just random. Where the dice fall is who wins. Settlement selection, construction, and road building usually have obvious optimal choices for the player, it’s trade where the actual game is at.
I have, it was good, but not great enough for me to really remember much about it. Reminded me of Settlers of the Stone Age. You’ve got dudes that have to move outward to settle, rather than building roads like in the standard game.
(My personal preference is C&K, or C&K+Seafarers. I rarely feel like playing plain ol’ settlers anymore, and I agree that 6 players is death (5 is merely dismemberment).)
I don’t think anyone has mentioned Die Siedler Von Catan: Das Buch zum spielen. It’s a book (in German) that includes several Settlers variants, with pieces included to play them. You can get a printed English translation of the rule if you buy the book through Mayfair games, or you can the translation via www.boardgamegeek.com.
Another good stand-alone version is Die Siedler Von Nurnberg, but it’s kind of hard to find. Cadamir: The First Settlers, is a neat spin, taking the basic rules of Settlers and grafting them on an adventure game.
That’s the problem. There’s more room on the board, therefore the players sort of cordon off their own areas and don’t interact with each other’s pieces as much. For example, it’s not likely that one players longest road will get cut off by another player. It’s less competitive. Also, the player that takes the early lead will most probably win, it’s very hard to catch up.
Slightly off-topic i suppose, but i’ve just moved house and my new local pub has, as well as the more traditional set of dominoes and jenga blocks, a copy of Settlers of Cataan behind the bar.
OK, so our little group finally got a chance to play these expansions (thanks again, JSG!)
Two out of the three of us were not impressed with the dice cards. The main complaint was that some of the conditions on the cards served no purpose other than to help remove advantages that one player may have gained, which we didn’t like, and this also served to lengthen the game unnecessarily. It seemed unnecessary to punish the leader by “leveling the field” as it were. I also didn’t like the fact that players were able to do a certain amount of card-counting because you know you’re only going to encounter so many of each number in the deck. This had a fairly major influence on placement of the robber and willingness to build settlements on certain spaces. I suppose there are arguments for that being a positive or a negative, but I didn’t like it.
The Great River expansion seems interesting, although none of us capitalized on it. Also, the other two players didn’t like that this expansion added a need for two additional victory points, as they felt it makes the game go on too long (I disagreed). But we all are interested in trying this one again (keeping the game at 10 victory points, though).
