Part I was largely about how i found myself chosen and made my way to the Catan World Championships in Malta. Now to talk about the competition itself. Strategy vs Luck and some other third thing! The most asked question, by fellow competitors, and others, during the weekend of the Catan World Championships was 'Strategy vs Luck. What is your percentage?' Because Catan involves dice, there is a certain amount of luck involved. My [...]
So we are going to be designing a board game. Or maybe we are still at the stage of that being a question. i honestly can't remember where the idea came from, but suddenly it was there and this morning i met with my friend Ashley Visagie [who incidentally was over at my house with his wife Helene the night before eating homemade pizza and playing board games] to discuss the possibilities. Monopoly is an [...]
There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who play 'board games' and those who play board games. Oh, and my dad. He hates all games. Three kinds of people in the world... Our chief weapon is Settlers of Catan, that's right... The Settlers of Catan, sometimes shortened to just Catan, is a multiplayer board game designed by Klaus Teuber and first published in 1995 in Germany by Franckh-Kosmos Verlag (Kosmos) as Die [...]
A few weeks ago, tbV and our two housemates Aaron and Sarah went for a meal and games-playing evening [yes, Settlers of Catan] to our friends from church, Mike and Leah. Aaron and Mike have at least one thing in common in that they both work in what must be one of the best jobs in the world - teaching young children engineering concepts through Lego [or Legos if you're Americanese!]. So before we went to [...]
there is a difference between people who play games and game players - the people who commented on the intro to this blog series post that they love 'Balderdash' and '30 Seconds' are people who play games... for game players [and it's not a judgemental difference, just a difference] are the kinds of people who can invest some serious time in a game for both the vibe of the game [people who play games] and [...]
my family and friends have always played a lot of games [except for my dad, he hates games with a passion, his favourite is sitting in the lounge reading his newspaper while the rest of the family plays trivial pursuit and shouting out all the answers, but that's about the closest he gets] but my mom and my sisters love games, and the large majority of friends in my and now our friend ship circles [...]
i gather a lot of people out there will have known settlers of catan but i imagine a lot fewer of you will have heard of this gem - Carcassonne - or as we like to refer to it "Kucky Sahn" in the slightest bit similiar to settlers in that the board is different every time (thus each game is vastly different unlike a risk, cluedo or monopoly which have a relative sameness to them) [...]
so you've played Settlers of Catan now and you're looking for something more challenging, even more invigorating... is it even possible? why yes it is, settlers of catan: cities and knights - takes all the brilliance, variety, strategy and intrigue of Settlers and then sends it up a notch (or a couple of notches) there are a bunch of expansion packs for settlers of catan and i haven't tried them all (heard too many disparaging [...]
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 [...]
'a theist believes in at least one god, but denies the existence of many gods' [the skeptic's dictionary] whereas an atheist denies the existence of god completely and 'at heist' is just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but that's not important now... a theist and an atheist - so vastly different and yet the difference between them is nothing... or 'a space' to be more precise... [disclaimer: oh [...]
