{"id":647,"date":"2007-05-08T12:23:51","date_gmt":"2007-05-08T16:23:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2007\/05\/08\/catan-on-xbox\/"},"modified":"2008-02-18T03:30:19","modified_gmt":"2008-02-18T07:30:19","slug":"catan-on-xbox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2007\/05\/08\/catan-on-xbox\/","title":{"rendered":"Catan on Xbox"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s odd, but the prospect of playing an online version of Settlers of Catan<\/em> with high production values has me closer to dropping coin on a console than all the zombie\/alien\/robot killing glamor that the living room gamers have been screaming about for years.<\/p>\n

So it’s reassuring to read Julian Murdoch’s positive impressions<\/a> of Big Huge Games’ break from real time strategy development. Julian writes:<\/p>\n

The root game, Settlers of Catan<\/em>, is nearly multi-player solitaire. Far from an indictment, many of the best German board games can be similarly described. Unlike a first person shooter, players don’t actively work against each other as much as they all participate in individual gathering and building games, with a single direct interaction — trade negotiation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Multiplayer solitaire sums up the experience of the so-called German games quite well. I recently taught my wife to play Ticket to Ride<\/em>, and, in its two-player mode, it is very much two solo players keeping score on the same map. The more players you add, the more important jobbing other people becomes.<\/p>\n

I’ll echo Julian on the importance of real time training. I’ve been lucky to have had a board game tutor Skype me through four or five different games over the last couple of years and I’ve come to rely on the voice training. I’ve tried teaching games through typing in chat, but it doesn’t work as well.<\/p>\n

It’s curious that he says that Catan<\/em> “has absolutely nailed the Catan experience” when a few paragraphs earlier he was talking about how the social side of gaming was integral to the board game, a side that he finds totally missing from the online interaction.<\/p>\n

There seems to be a bit of a revival of interest in board gaming, and hopefully the mainstream nature of the console experience will mean that better games will be available for everyone. But revivals begin at home, so I should probably teach TTR to some of my friends. Maybe they’ll be ready for Catan<\/em> by summer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s odd, but the prospect of playing an online version of Settlers of Catan with high production values has me closer to dropping coin on a console than all the zombie\/alien\/robot killing glamor that the living room gamers have been screaming about for years. So it’s reassuring to read Julian Murdoch’s positive impressions of Big […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[29,7,74],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-ar","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}