1 post tagged “board games”

We received a game for Christmas this year called "Settlers of Catan," and broke it out to play the other night.  It has a hexagonal, variable game board that snaps together like a puzzle and can have four players or teams of players.  We played it with the older two kids while Rose did something else.  Reading children make life so much easier;  the number and quality of games you can play as a  family rises dramatically.  Anyway, the game is vaguely like a mix of risk and monopoly.  Instead of money, you collect resources, wool, grain, ore, bricks, or wood, on each turn.  Each turn you can turn your resources into roads, settlements, or cities,  or a "development card" thereby increasing your chances of getting even more resources next turn.  Settlements and Cities, and some of the development cards are worth "Victory Points" --  and when a player reaches 10 of these, the game is over.  Each area of the board: pasture, woods, mines, clayfields, farms; yields a resource and has a number on it.  If you have a settlement bordering that resource, whenever anyone rolls that number, you get a resource card.  There is also a thief, so when anyone rolls a seven, they can steal a resource card from another player.  Also, when the thief is deployed, anyone who has more than 7 resource cards has to turn half of them back to the bank  --  which encourages you to build, rather than hoard resources.  Player to player trading is encouraged as well.  We've played twice as a family and it is quite addictive.