I caught an NPR commentary today by Russell Roberts, an economist at George Mason U. Roberts was on about Monopoly being a bad model for the business world in that it portrays capitalism as only a Marxist would see it. He pointed out several of the idiotic assumptions in the game, and mentioned a far better game model in ‘The Settlers of Catan’. In these ‘German-style’ board games, “…players compete, but they also co-operate and trade in various ways…” teaching how to build wealth and success in a more realistic way, with greater emphasis on strategy and negotiation. I had to check it out…

The board game is not new by any means - it hails from at least the early 90s, if not earlier. It’s put out by Mayfair, and is available in a huge number of
variants, a lot of them in German. This is cool for me, since I could probably figure most of it out given time - with the help of the babelfish or
LEO, anyway… but there are English versions too. There are a lot of reviews and general info about ‘Settlers’ at
rainydaygames.us and they seem to have a fairly good price on it, but I will probably pick mine up locally at Men at Arms in Middle Island if I decide to get it.

I wanted to get a better feeling for the game, because despite all the praise, it still looked like one of those ‘little chit’ games where you end up with a zillion little squares that all look the same out of cardboard and lose most of them before anyone even gets serious about playing…

In short order I found an open source, Java-based version on sourceforge called JSettlers. As a client/server based Java game, it might not be as approachable as some other versions, but I try to stick with open source projects whenever I can (mainly because I get a chance to participate in development in some small way if I choose to by game testing, reporting bugs, correcting text, etc.). I downloaded version 1.0.6 as a gzipped tarball to the Mac. Unpacking revealed a server jar file and a client jar file. The readme gave very good instructions regarding how to launch the server, and then the client from the command line. It also gave command line instructions to load up three AI (artificail intelligence) players (robots) to play against. You can opt to run the server and have your friends connect up to you, or run just a client and find some online server running someplace, but I was just interested in learning if the gameplay was fun. It turns out, I caught JSettlers in a couple of mistakes (or at least I am calling them mistakes until someone on the project can point out to me where I goofed), but as an exercise in learning the rules of the game and for it’s net-playable potential, it gets high marks from me.

Since PHP was recently upgraded on the server, I can’t upload pictures to these stories in the normal way - a screenshot of the game in action
is in the gallery instead.

Man, it was fun! The rules were really simple - non-gamers would certainly be able to play, and quickly. I spent most of the time playing with Emily looking over my shoulder and offering ideas for trades, so it seems like it will hold a kid’s attention as well. The aspect of trading in the game was great - you might find yourself negotiating two or three trades for each person’s turn, trying to get what you need and not give up too much in return. A full game (to 10 points) would probably take under 2 hours once you were comfortable with the turn sequence, and playing once on the computer (and reading along with the rules), I’m sure is enough to prepare you for your first full-blown tabletop game. Thumbs up from me on this one - hopefully I can convince some other folks to give it a try.