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Settlers of Catan brings "Eurogames" to English-speaking countries
Excerpt from: Why we still love board games, by Tim Harford, FT Weekend’s Magazine’s Undercover Economist
Published: July 17 2010
The Settlers of Catan superficially resembles Monopoly. The board is assembled from hexagonal tiles, but the components
include wood houses that look much like Monopoly buildings. The idea is similar, too: players use resources (money in
Monopoly; timber, wool and other commodities in Settlers) to build property; the property then collects further resources, and
the process of expansion continues.
Yet after Monopoly, Settlers was a revelation. Monopoly ends in the slow strangulation of the weaker players and usually feels
stale long before the official end, assuming it isn’t abandoned along the way. Settlers didn’t take long – perhaps an hour – and
even as it was coming to an end, every player was still involved. In Monopoly, many choices can be made on autopilot; in
Settlers, there is scope for skill throughout a game: the decisions always matter and
are always interesting. Settlers has its own elegant economy, in which the supply and
demand for five different commodities are determined by tactics, luck and the stage
of the game. Players constantly haggle, wheedle and plead. It’s convivial experience,
a game of incessant banter.
Settlers is the game that brought “German-style” or “Eurogame” board games to the
attention of an English-speaking audience. The board game market in Germany is more
like the book market in other countries: several hundred new games are launched
there every year – typically either at Essen’s Spiel convention in October or the
Nuremberg Toy Festival in February – and each year, at least one new game will
sell hundreds of thousands of copies, perhaps millions, as Settlers has.
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