Board Games Night
by Peter JayIn college I used to play board games regularly, from social party games to strategy games. I think I like strategy games the best. I don’t like games where I have to be creative or answer pop culture questions, because I always end up embarrassing myself in a dramatic way that everyone seems to remember for months afterward. Strategy board games or card games are always fun.
Once I was invited by a girl to play a game called Settlers with her friends. I had never heard of that game and didn’t think it sounded exciting. I went to play it anyway, but for some reason it didn’t happen. A year later some of my friends started playing Settlers of Catan every Sunday evening, so I thought I would give it a try. I played a game one night with my roommates. The first game I played was pretty fun, but I couldn’t understand how to play much. They were all experienced players and I was just learning as I played. I lost the first few games that I played, although I came close to winning several times. They all knew strategies of how to win, things that I didn’t yet even know about.
Settlers of Catan is one of those Board Games that make people mad and want to fight. You need to build roads, settlements and cities and get resources. Often people are cutting you off and ruining your game since resources are scarce and everyone is going after the same resources. You can also trade resource cards with other players to help you build and help other players. If you help one player you are hurting the other players. Once players are good, they usually don’t trade much anymore. One strategy is to only trade on your own turn or the person right before your turn. That way it helps you out more and not someone else. If you really want to make someone mad, block them off, even though it doesn’t help you that much, you are just doing it to intentionally ruin their game. That makes it really fun.
The way you win Settlers of Catan is to get to 11 points first, or you can set it higher. I like to play to 15 points because it makes the game last a little longer and you all get to build more. You get points by building settlements and cities, by getting the longest road, or the largest army. You build by getting the resources required to build each individual settlement or city. You get the largest army by getting soldiers, which can be used to move the robber. The robber is used to keep a resource plot from producing cards for the people who have settlements on it, and when you use the robber you get to take a card from someone. You use the robber by rolling a seven with the dice.
Once I finally started getting good at Settlers of Catan we made it more difficult by playing Cities and Knights of Catan. Cities and Knights of Catan adds a lot more variables to Settlers of Catan, and once you build cities, you can lose them if you don’t have enough knights to protect you when the pirate ship attacks. The pirate ship moves each time a black ship is rolled in one of the dice. It makes you very mad when you lose a city. It really sets you back. There are ways to steal other players’ knights also, so you can steal their knights right before the pirate ship arrives and make them real mad.
There are other strategies in the Cities and Knights of Catan board game as well. There are commodity cards instead of just resource cards. With commodity cards you can do a lot of other things. You can get things to put on your cities so that they are always protected from robbers. You can make it so that you get resource cards of your choice whenever none of your numbers are rolled by the dice. With all of these variables there are many more ways to mess up other players’ games as well. It makes you even more mad than Settlers of Catan.
Well, after I learned Settlers of Catan, I still kept losing all the time because we started playing Cities and Knights of Catan, and again, everyone knew how to play and knew all of the strategies, except me. I at least won enough games to keep liking it though, and keep playing. If you are looking for a way to have a fight and get mad a lot, or to have a lot of fun, then start playing board games. Settlers of Catan has won a lot of awards for being board game of the year before and is a good board game to play to have fun with friends and family.