|
This page last updated Tuesday, 06-Sep-2005 12:28:47 EDT.
|
Role Playing News
Volume 4, Number 1 - March 1, 1998
The Roving Gamer is Mark Christopher. To submit articles contact him
at:
The Roving Gamer
1811 Beacon St
Brookline, MA 02146
or e-mail torrin@io.com
Volume 4, Number 1
March 1, 1998
Back to Simplicity: The Settlers of Catan
by the Roving Gamer
If your gaming groups are anything like ours, you not only have a lot of role-playing rules and source books around, but also a slew of other games. Now, about half the people I role-play with are also wargamers, so most of the other games we have are these complex monsters with rulebooks anywhere from 25 to 800 pages. You can imagine my pleasant surprise when I opened up a birthday present from my girlfriend that contained Settlers of Catan.
Settlers is a German board game marketed here in the U. S. By Mayfair games (recently purchased by I. C. E.), and it is simplicity itself. Three or four players compete to create the most successful settlement on the island of Catan by using the five resources found there to build things such as roads, settlements, and cities. The island itself is constructed by randomly placing 19 land tiles, each of which provides either a wood, clay (for bricks), ore, sheep (for wool), or wheat. Chits numbered from 1 to 12 are then placed on the tiles, which determine which tiles produce each turn, based on a 2d6 die roll. The players then each place 2 roads and 2 settlements, and play starts. The first person to get to 10 points (based on a scoring system for how each colony is doing) wins.
It's an amazingly fast, simple, and interactive game as each person gets their resources, trades (or doesn't trade) with the other players, and builds up his or her own colony. Racing each other for the best locations (those which are most likely to produce resources), cutting one another off, and attempting to steal each other resources make for more excitement than one would expect from reading the back of the box, and the hour or so it takes to play means that another game can be quickly played, so those who felt shafted in one can attempt revenge.
Settlers of Catan is a game that deserves far more fame than it has now, and is (hopefully) destined to be found among the timeless classic board games like Scrabble or Monopoly. This one is definitely a must buy.
Volume 4, Number 1
March 1, 1998
Air Baron
by the Roving Gamer
Many of my friends and I play the various and famous Mayfair "crayon rails" games, so when I saw Air Baron in a neighborhood game store, I decided to give it a try. I'm glad I did.
Each player (from 2 to 6) runs a U. S. airline, attempting to get the largest combination of market share and cash while taking over markets, buying jumbo jets, getting lucrative foreign routes, or muscling competitors out of regions. The advanced rules throw things like government contracts, strikes, loans, rising fuel costs, and even crashes into the mix. Luck does play a large role in the game, as each player pulls "profit chits" from a cup to determine who (if anyone) earns any money that turn. However, that, and the fact that profits can range anywhere from $1 to $40 per chit (I like to imagine each dollar being the equivalent of a million bucks, myself) means that you can't be certain of being in the lead until you've actually won, and come from behind victories are very possible. Also a (relatively speaking) very easy game, this can be played within 2 hours and less, perfect for a quick, cutthroat game.
The game can tend to start slowly (due to the low amount of starting cash; possibly as low as $2), but once it gets going and people are wrestling back and forth over air hubs, the game can quickly turn into an everyone for themselves fight for dominance. There are many strategies to choose from in your quest for the top; buy jumbo jets to maximize profits on valuable airports or to make takeover attempts easier, buy foreign routes for defense of air hubs and to try for a big profit score, pay off a strike or outlast the strikers; these and many others are choices that you have to make as CEO of your airline. Always having been an avid crayon rail-gamer, I actually prefer this game to those because of the interaction between players, and the ability to suddenly spring ahead (or be forced down) due to a well-timed takeover of a major hub. Air Baron is yet another game that should be on gamer's shelves everywhere, a fun family game or a good, savage business war game.
|
