Settling New Frontiers

We have had a weekly (now turned fortnightly) Settlers of Catan game going on at work for about a year and a half now (we play during our lunch break). We have a scoreboard going, where we record wins, losses, total points, and average points (which we use to rank players). And we store images of the end state of the game. I would really love to be able to record the entire progress of the game, but unfortunately, we play using the actual board game, so recording all the moves would be really tiresome. What I'm interested in is trying to find out what the good strategies are behind the game. Obviously, part of the game is luck-based as it will depend on how the dice land, but I think even for a dice-based game, there is a lot of strategy behind it.

If you've never played the game before, ,then you can read the rules here, it's far too complex for me to summarise in a few lines. Or you can just ignore the rest of this post, as I'll just be talking about Settlers of Catan for the rest of it.

Note: When we play, we like to randomise the hexes, the number chits and the ports (though we do follow the no red numbers next to each other rule). Also, because we do keep track of a running score, we find that in some games, players will start to work on maximising their own score rather than stopping a player from winning, because they realise they have no chance to win, but they don't want their average score to drop by too much, so they build as much as they can before the game ends, even if it's not the best move.

I can't access our games log at the moment, as I am at home, but I managed to dig up some of the end state photos from six of our past games, spread throughout this post. I wanted to see if the winning player had something in common. Note: looking at this images alone, it might not be immediately obvious who won, as a player might have extra points from having victory point development cards, or the longest road/largest army bonus.

One thing that does seem common for all the winning players is that they have a lot of cities - which seems fairly logical, as it is very difficult to win with settlements, roads and development cards (you'd have to have 5 settlements + longest road + largest army + 1 VP card). Plus, cities also mean you start to get resources at twice the speed, so assuming you have a decent spread of resources, it will just lead to you expanding much faster. The only downside to cities is that they are very heavy on ore/stone, which is not the best resource to have in the early game, as you cannot use it to build roads or settlements, so you cannot expand outwards. Sure, you can upgrade your two starting settlements to cities, but you might end up trapped by other players, in which case, your only winning strategy becomes through development cards (2 cities + largest army + 4 VP cards).

If you look at the image below, you can see that the brown player got trapped and had no option but to expand towards the resource-poor dessert (it's a little hard to tell with the lighting in the photo, but white managed to cut brown off at the bottom).

Wheat tends to be a pretty powerful resource. It is needed for settlements in the early game, and cities in the mid-to-late game. It is also used in development cards. Our longest lasting games seem to be the ones where the wheat hexes have bad numbers, so wheat ends up being incredibly scarce. Sheep seems to be the weakest resource. It is also used in settlements and development cards, but nothing else. There always seems to be an abundance of sheep in the game, which means the sheep ports end up being quite powerful, as most people are happy to trade away sheep.

If you look at the game below, if a 4 or a 5 is rolled, the orange player is rolling in sheep, and he also managed to get the 2:1 sheep port. We ended up blocking his access to sheep for most of the game, but that didn't stop him. Side note: It seems 5 and 9 come up more often on the dice than probability would suggest. Geoff has suggested tossing out the dice that came with the game, and buying two new ones, but I think it's funny.

Getting the longest road doesn't seem all that great. It means you need access to a decent supply of brick/clay, which is only used for roads and settlements, and you usually end up having to defend your longest road, as unlike largest army, it's sometimes difficult to see how close someone is to stealing it away from you. The blue player in the below game managed to get, and keep, longest road, but he spent all of his resources on maintaining it (even though it wasn't really under threat), and never managed to upgrade any of his settlements to cities. He got some fairly sub-par settlements for his troubles (2wheat-3wood-8wood and 11what-11wood-8wood, 6wheat-wheatport, 4ore-sheepport (though he had no access to sheep)). To be fair though, that board was a pretty crappy set up, and he still managed to get 7 points.

Speaking of crappy setups, poor brown in the game below didn't manage to get very far, with only 3 settlements. I feel like starting placement has such a big impact on how the rest of the game is going to go, and part of that is dependent on where you happen to sit at the table, since the person who places first is the one who rolls the highest number, if you happen to be going in the middle, you miss out on the few best spots, and then you miss out on the good spots for your second placement as well.

My personal goals for choosing a starting position:

• try to get wheat if possible
• get ore, or try to find a place where you can expand to ore quickly
• look at the board to see which resources will be in short supply (the ones with crappy numbers), and which resources will be in high supply. If you have one of the short supply resources, you can end up getting good trades from other players as they'll be desperate for it
• look at where the ports are, and whether there's a clump of resources that'll enable you to make good use of that port (even if it means placing one of your starting settlements on only two hexes)
• try to get a decent variety of numbers, but I don't mean go for the 12 and the 2 just because your other settlement is on two 6s. I mean don't cluster all of your settlements around the same number, because you might be in for a dry spell. Well, it's a bit of a gamble, because you might get a lucky streak.

My last piece of advice for this game, and this probably goes for any competitive game, don't too big, too quickly. Otherwise you'll be the target of every single robbery, and it's not fun. =( Most importantly, it is about having fun. Sometimes we do things that aren't the ideal move, just because it's funny. At the end of the day, we all work together, so nobody acts incredibly competitive, though we have jokingly pulled the "If you steal from me, I'm not going to help you analyse the logs" card once or twice.

Do you have any Catan tips?