who remembers – with great reminiscory reverberations – sitting up all nite as a lightie playing monopoly til all hours of the morning? [pretty much the only way to finish a decent game]

or waging full on risk warfare with your little yellow three edge single men wedges and your bigger yellow five edge ten-men wedges until you had cornered the last remaining opponent in australia and piled the biggest force known to world domination in indonesia to ensure a ridiculously bad-sported overwhelming victory?

well i just thort it was time to highlight a couple of other games that may be just what you need if you have never evolved past those, cluedo, dominoes or uno…

and probably king of the pile is ‘settlers of catan’, or as i got to know it ‘die siedlar von catan’ [my good friend steve taylor taught me the game using a german set] quite a whole bunch of years ago actually, altho it’s maybe just in the last 5 or so that it has taken off hugely amongst me and my friends [in fact, three years ago i ‘happened to be’ in joburg when boardgames.co.za was running their annual Settlers competition and i happened to come second so for a while i was officially the number 2 player in the country!]

the thing about settlers as opposed to one or two of the other games i might mention here is that a game is likely to take you between 2 and 4 hours [our record is 7 and a half *cough* deane hill *cough* please move already cough] and so it is a longer game, but if you do have the time, it really is an absolute winner.

probly the coolest element of settlers of catan is that the board is different every time because the board is made up of these hexagon shaped cards that have one of five resources on them – wheat (hay), tree (wood), brick (clay), ore (ore) and sheep (baa) – and so these cards are shuffled and then put face up to form the board and a differing layout of the resources which affects gameplay – so the game is always different which is nice.

i’m not going to explain the whole game to you here cos it won’t make sense without seeing the board and the pieces and so on but the basic idea is that you have settlements (little hut pieces) and cities (bigger hut pieces) that sit on the edge of three resource pieces, and each resource piece has a number on it, and every time the dice throws and you have a settlement/city touching a resource with that number on it, you pick up the corresponding resource card – so as dice are thrown you are picking up different resource cards which you then use to build roads, more settlements/cities and buy armies and monopoly style community chest/chance type cards which give you special powers and bonuses.

and when settlers – as it is commonly called – becomes a little bit normal for you, there are a series of expansion packs you can buy – which are basically other games using the settlers formula and i’ll talk about my best one – cities and knights – in a later blog

you will never want to play monopoly or risk again… so if you have never played the recommendation would be to change your facebook status to “anyone got a copy of settlers of catan they want to teach me” and take it from there – the game itself will cost you a few hundred rand and so is fairly expensive (cheaper if you bring over from overseas) but it is worth hours and hours of fun and competition…

let’s hear it from those who have played the game…

to see my review of the settlers expansion game Cities and Knights click here