Marie WheelerI love board games! I never thought I would be a board gamer and spent most of my life actively avoiding situations
in which board games would be involved. I did have a brief stint with Magic in my early 20’s, but beyond that it was awesome, but horrible memories of playing Sorry! with my brother. He was possibly the first incarnation of Sorry, not Sorry.
Flash forward maaany years. A friendship had started up with my yoga teacher, Ashley, and she had invited me and A.D. for a board game night with her husband and friends. It sounded fun. We ended up playing The Settlers of Catan, and it kind of changed everything.
But why? Well, there are a couple of reasons: Catan is a great introduction to board gaming, it was unrealized fun that I never expected and made me want to play more games! We started watching a lot of YouTube content on gaming and found TableTop with Wil Wheaton, which I highly recommend!
Catan is a resource-management game wherein you, as settlers on the island of Catan, build settlements, cities and roads. There is strategy to the game in terms of gaining the required resources in order to build as well as chance in card draws and dice rolls. And there is a robber! It has significant re-playability in that the hexagonal board can be constructed in a number of ways and with the randomization of die rolls, it is never the same game twice.
If you do somehow happen to get bored with the original, there are numerous expansions such as Cities & Knights, Explorers & Pirates, Seafarers, spin-offs like Star Trek Catan, and extensions to make the game for 5-6 players. In other works, they have marketed the hell out of this game, but I’m okay with that! I have played the original, the extension and Star Trek Catan and have thoroughly enjoyed all versions.
My best suggestion is to grab a copy of the game, invite over a couple of friends and have some fun!
P.S. I’m an Amazon affiliate, so if you click on the game links above, it helps me to sustain the costs associated with blogging and creating content for omniasubsole. If you don’t, no worries, I appreciate the time you took to read my post 🙂
