The Shrine

I played this over the weekend with some friends and I realized this game really sucks if you have a bunch of bad players in the game. For example, say A moves robber to B's territory, and then B rolls a 7 but he doesn't retaliate and attacks me with the robber because A and B are friends, and no I was not ahead nor do I control any crucial resource. Or, the guys who keep on trade resources to a guy who has 7 victory points and 1 road away from longest road in a position nobody can stop. I don't expect people to know the game inside out and whatnot, but if you're going to trade with a guy who is about to win then what's the point of playing the game? Might as well play Texas Hold'Em since at least I've never seen people fold pocket aces because his opponent was his good friend.

It's pretty interesting how a game with considerable game theory implication becomes a joke of a game when people do not exercise retaliation as expected. It is obviously pretty easy to rip someone off in Settlers of Catan assuming you start out trusting (it's a good idea for any such type games) and that in itself isn't a bad thing, but you don't say trade away all your Sheep for spare resources, use a Monopoly card on sheep, and then trade sheeps for stuff again on the same turn. In my point of view, if you pull a move like that you're basically saying you're now ready to fight the wrath of the other 3 players because you're about to win. But no like two of the other guys I played with just continued business as usual. I'm guessing I could offer say a bad 2 to 1 trade (on my favor) to someone with 6 cards and then play a Knight, forcing the guy to discard, and these guys would never thought that they should immediately retaliate on a very deliberate attack on a particular person. But if you're that trusting/forgiving, then the game becomes ridiculously stupid!

Another thing I noticed is lack of etiquette, it's sort of like the lack of say 'no rush'. It might be dumb but there's usually a reason why it's done. Two of the people I play with was taking at least 5 minute+ each turn just asking every person for what to trade (and figuring out what resources people have in the process). Now if everyone played like that the game will not finish on time because people would be too tired before enough turns have passed for a winner, but if you end your turn quick and only offer reasonable trades as opposed to list every combination of 5 resources trade that is advantageous to you, then you clearly come out on a resource advantage. It's not a good strategy to do the same thing because if everyone does this, then no one wins because you'd run out of time before the game actually finishes. I was pushing for one trade offer turn if not accepted (i.e. if you ask "A for B" and it's not accepted that's it, if someone accepts it you can keep going) but of course people didn't like that idea. We barely had enough time to finish one game even with 2 out of the 4 players having extremely fast turn (me and another) by virtually not trading at all.

How much time do you see as optimal for a full game of Catan? (hint: It's kinda like asking how long should a game of Risk or Monopoly take :p)

If people take too long on their turns, or are being stupid, they are who I punish!

Well I consider too long to be that if you know the game can't possibly finish before the guys you play with are going to go home. Our game lasted about 2 hours and I wasn't even sure those guys were going to stick around for 2 hours. Now I realize you shouldn't just go in hyper speed for the sake of finishing but like 75% of the time was taken up by 2 guys who need to go through every possible combination of resource trading during their turn on just trades. It's really stupid when nobody has rolled say bricks for the last 20 turns and you're still losing 2 minutes each turn because someone wanted to trade for bricks.

It's true that if you have certain players that are dumb enough to trade with people who are pretty high in the game, they can get them to win. But, it's possible that YOU are the person who is coming close to winning.

There's a lot of luck involved in Catan, though, so it's hard to draw certain conclusions from a few games.

I just started playing so it's not like I'm an expert at this game, but some of the guys I'm playing probably aren't even aware they're trading with someone who already has 9 visible victory points.

I had like 5 victory points the entire game and that's with having the largest army too, so I was nowhere close to winning the game.

I mean, I understand these guys will just say they're only playing this for fun, but again if you're going to ignore someone who just moved robber to a 6 or an 8 hex you own, or trade with a guy who have 9 victory points, then we might as well play Texas Hold'Em instead because it's clear you're not even remotely thinking about how to play. Catan as a game cannot possibly function without retaliation built in. When you're going to mess someone up there's supposed to be a risk of getting screwed back. Without the retaliation element, Catan is just an inferior version of Monopoly.

People sometimes have difficulty thinking strategically in ways that matter - they tend to be ego-centric. I don't mean they have huge egos, nor do I mean they always act in their own self-interest - quite the opposite.

Unsophisticated players in strategic games often think in terms of "How can I improve my standing?" That's necessary to win, of course, but it's not sufficiently deep. A sophisticated player then further figures out what his standing is in comparison to the other players, and also what they can do not just to improve their own standing, but to undermine other players' standings. Hence, unsophisticated players make irrational trades which may marginally improve their own standing, but substantially increase the gap between themselves and who they're trading with. You're probably right that such behavior is easier to spot in Texas Hold 'Em, since it's probably easier to gauge relative strength than it is in a game with multiple resources.

Well Texas Hold'Em doesn't really have cooperation unless you count cheating. If there's 7 of me versus whoever the best Texas Hold'Em guy is, I don't gain a significant advantage beyond having 7 times the chips. If I am allowed to tell my other 6 selves what cards I have I'd gain an edge, but that's usually consider cheating as it is certainly not a form of cooperation allowed by the game. If the 7 versions of me only start with 1/7th the chips, it's not clear to me if there's any advantage going that way versus just having myself started with the standard chips.

I think another problem with Catan is that it is not always immediately, or rather blatantly obvious, who is winning in such a game. In Monopoly or Starcraft or most games that features multiple players you can usually tell who is running away with a victory, but Catan you can be firmly in control sitting on just 6 visible points. I think here the problem is that the board game version doesn't list your scores so some people won't even bother adding it up, since if it was the web version that keeps your score up the whole time, it should at least occur to you that a person with 9 victory points is about to win the game so you clearly should not ever trade with him. I'm not even sure if the guys I play with are aware the person they're trading with has 9 victory points.

Texas Hold 'Em doesn't have cooperation, but it's easy to get sucked up into thinking only about the possibilities of your own hand, and not what the other possible hands are.

Exactly. You could think your one-handed straight (one-handed = using only one card in your hand) is pretty damn good, until you realize that a two-handed straight or any higher one-handed card could beat your straight, and if somebody else has the same one card, it's still a split. I see a lot of players get caught up in the fact that a "straight" or "flush" is a powerful hand, without thinking about how common it is with the community already giving everybody four cards out of five.