Sunday, November 28, 2010

Favorable Euro game article in the Washington Post

Whoa!  Check this out!
Instead, the great board game of this era is The Settlers of Catan. That game, which came out in Germany in 1995, is not a household name like Monopoly, and given that electronic games have eclipsed board games, it may never be. But it presents a world in which resources are limited and fortunes are intertwined, and serves as a model for solving contemporary problems such as trade imbalances, nuclear proliferation, and climate change.
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 Try Settlers of Catan instead. It's more fulfilling and more fun. There should be more to life than rolling the dice and going in circles. Settlers teaches new ways of thinking and presents a different notion of winning: by a nose instead of by a mile. The game is won by earning 10 victory points, but points are earned by a combination of building settlements and cities, having the longest road or the largest army, or drawing cards. A Settlers win doubles as a lesson in a world where resources are finite and unevenly distributed. It's a game for a moment when no one - even Americans, happily playing board games - should expect a perpetual monopoly on power.

1 comment:

Eric Haas said...

Only 10 years behind… I’m impressed.