Many parents nowadays argue about how their kids and teens stay glued to their video consoles all the time, and they continually find it hard to spend any time with them. Oftentimes, most of them have never really considered board games as an activity that they could engage in to spend more time together as a family. If you happen to fall within this bracket, then a good board game to begin with would be Catan – a well known strategy based game that is based on a fictional island. This is a game that has won the Game of The Century Award in 2015, so you can bet that it deserves the top spot on our list of the best board games to play with your family.
Why We Like It – Catan Studios Cantan 2017
Like the Carcassonne that is based on reconstructing a French city, the Catan board game is one that is based on civilisation-building, and one that demands the use of strategy to figure out what the best way to acquire resources would be. The objective here is to find out the fastest way to get to 10 points.
- Strategy focussed
- Challenging
- 3-4 Players
- Too complex for young kids
Performance
The Catan fictional board game is composed of 19 interchangeable hexagonal tiles, each representing a different landscape. They include a forest, field, mountain, hill & pasture. For each of these landscapes, there is a corresponding resource. These are wool, brick, ore, grain and lumber, and they’re all needed for players to be able to develop their fictional settlements. To begin, everyone starts off by placing 2 settlements on 2 roads, and the point here is to place your settlement near a landscape that you can get a specific resource from. Playing this game might take close to 60 minutes per round, but if you prefer something that takes a shorter while to finish, check out the azul board game, or if you’d like a game that teaches you about US geography and travel routes, you can’t go wrong with the Days Wonder Do7201 Ticket Ride.
Design
Unlike the ticket to ride board game, the Catan board game doesn’t have a lot of moving parts, so it’s pretty easy to get into the flow of things once you’ve sat through a session or two. During setup, the hexagonal tiles are put together in a shape that finally resembles a honeycomb, and then number disks are then placed on each resource tile. The two settlements that each player gets to have in the first and second rounds are represented by miniature houses, and the roads by sticks. There are also three types of cards one should know about. There’s the building cost card that shows the combination of resources needed to buy a development, a resource card to show what resources you can get from a terrain, and a development card that has certain advantages that could propel you forward in the game.
Value
All you have to do to win this game is be the first to reach 10 points. These points can be racked up by building the most settlements and roads, or owning the longest road on the board. For each turn to be played, two dice are rolled, and the sum of the dice will be matched to a number token on the hexagonal tile. If your settlement happens to be closest to that tile, then you get to earn the resource that it represents. When building a settlement, each player refers to a building cost card that reflects which resources are needed to buy a resource. For example, a road may be bought with one wood and one brick resource card. All in all, this game depends on the individual’s ability to amass points faster than his competitors. If you want to foster cooperation within your group and prefer to win as a team, a game like the pandemic board game might be worth checking out.
Catan Studios Cantan 2017 Wrap Up
Catan is a strategy game that will definitely challenge each player’s ability to think and plan ahead. While it is fun for the whole family, older players might have an advantage over younger ones due to their ability to think strategically.
