Game: Settlers of Catan Dice Game
Designers: Klaus Teuber
Publisher: Mayfair Games (2009)
Age Range: 8 & up
Number of Players: 2 and up
Game Time: 45 minutes
Mechanics: Dice rolling/resource management
Complexity: 3
Challenge: 3

        Back in May of 2008, I had occasion to be the stage manager for a production of The Wizard of Oz here in Wilmington, NC. It was my first collaboration with what’s referred to as the “state community theater of North Carolina” and it had been quite a while since I’d undertaken that particular job in the production of a musical. Among the many other things to which I found myself re-adjusting, was oversight of a group of a dozen children, aged from about 8 to 12, who, with the exception of Dorothy, had been cast in the role of Munchkins.

       There was, of course, an army of backstage Moms, who undertook the more generalized baby-sitting role, while my job tended toward making sure they got up onto the stage on time and just generally checking in with how things were going in the often-tumultuous area of their dressing rooms. Their time on stage (with the exception of Dorothy, of course) was limited, which left a lot of pre-adolescent children in a confined space for what was, for them, a relatively long time. This dictated the need for some sort of activities, which would keep them from wandering around, particularly backstage during a performance.

        Enter The Settlers of Catan Dice Game.

       As with any normal group of kids that age, the personality differences were all over the map and not, generally speaking, specific to gender; from the kid who was quite content to sit in a chair and read a book, to the kid bouncing off walls and inevitably getting into trouble. As we approached opening night and their performance ‘schedule’ got more defined (where they had to be and not be at specific times), I gathered the lot of them, Dorothy included, into a dressing room and said I had a challenge for them. I introduced them to the Settlers of Catan Dice Game and told them that I would give the game to the person who, at the close of the show, had scored the highest amount of total points, playing a single game. I asked the parental adults to more or less oversee this process, because there were for sure, a couple of wily kids who wouldn’t hesitate to just fill in the paper scorecard without playing the game, indicating the highest score possible. In fact, one kid who handed me a completed scorecard, tried that (the adult supervision process wasn’t perfect). When I pointed out to him that the high score he tried to submit was impossible, he mumbled something about a mistake and skulked away.

       It worked far better than I would have imagined. Just a little over half of them in the cast got involved, including the youngest – a precocious and utterly delightful 6-year-old girl, who charmed the pants off of every audience that saw the show with her solo sung lines as The Coroner. Even Dorothy, who was virtually on-stage every minute, could be found before the show and during intermission, with the dice cup in hand, trying to score as many points as possible. It didn’t rein them all in, but as an activity for just above half of them, it reduced the predictable chaos to manageable levels, most of the time.

       Instead of playing out on what would have been an unwieldy board, the dice game is played on a single, small sheet of paper on which is drawn the legendary Island of Catan. On paper, this island consists of six hexagons and a series of roads, settlements, cities, and knights, all marked with point values. Using a set of six die, marked with resources (brick, lumber, sheep, grain, ore and gold), players try to amass the necessary resources by rolling these die, in a manner similar to Yatzhee; three total rolls in which you maintain or re-roll to your satisfaction. A small ‘table’ imprinted on the sheet of paper reminds players which resources can be used to ‘build’ the roads, settlements, cities and knights. On any given turn, the player rolls his/her die, and uses the ‘resource’ result to build something and scores the points associated with that something on their individual sheet. Each player gets 15 turns to accomplish this, and since each has their own map, there’s no ‘in-game’ competition for the resources or building possibilities.

       You do the best you can with the die rolls, score the points for a round and pass the die to whoever else is playing. Repeat through the 15 rounds and tally up the final scores. There are rules governing how you can accomplish your objectives in each round. You can’t, for example, just build a road anywhere on the map. It has to be connected to a road already built. You can’t, as further example, build just any settlement, city or knight. It has to have a road already built to it and has to be built in ascending order of value (you have to build the 3-point settlement before you build the 5-point settlement; the 7-point city before the 12-point city). This adds a significant measure of complication to the process, which, in spite of their ages, most of the kids got wrapped up in readily.

       Mayfair Games has just published a Deluxe Edition of this game, which offers a second map, on the flip side of the Basic Map. The object switches to Victory Points (like the board game) and (also like the board game) focuses more directly onto the construction of settlements and cities. It also adds points related to Largest Army (knights) and Roads, while maintaining the die roll mechanism. It notches the challenge up just a bit and is a terrific edition to the basic dice game.

       The Settler of Catan Dice Game and its recently released Deluxe Edition (with its leather-bound dice cup) is yet another worthy edition to the Catan legacy. It’s Settlers of Catan-Light, so to speak, with all of that designation’s reduction in brain-burn ‘calories.’ There’s enough of a challenge in it, especially with the Deluxe Edition’s extra map and added rules, to engage your basic die-hard gamer. At the same time, as demonstrated by my challenge to the Munchkins of The Wizard of Oz in North Carolina, it’s light and breezy enough to be enjoyed by a broad cross-section of kids.

       My thanks to Mayfair Games for forwarding me a copy of the Deluxe Edition, after I had given away the original dice game to the winner of my challenge.

The news from:http://www.examiner.com/x-2590-Board-Game-Examiner~y2009m9d4-The-Settlers-of-Catan-Dice-Game-Preadolescent-crowd-control-in-a-box