Wargame Night 03-12

On March 10th Ross, Bob, Tim, Wayne, and myself got together for a Settlers Cataan: Knights and Cities 5-6 Player Expansion game. This particular Settler's map is pretty much one huge island and as it was randomly constructed the island was divided in the upper north of the map by two desert hexes side by side. Amazingly, no one placed their opening settlements in that part of the board and thus we were all concentrated in the relative center of the map.

As a big believer in the number "5", I convinced Tim to place a settlement on a "5" hex and foolishly he agreed! This prompted Tim to record every roll we were to make in the game to test whether or not certain numbers are indeed more likely to be rolled over others. Of course, I still placed my city and settlement on an "8" and "5" hex respectively to ensure maximum coverage.

After everyone placed their settlements it became evident that the cluster of buildings was centered along the middle of the island leaving only the outside coastline available for future development. Of course, the northern most desert area was also open to colonization.

There was a rule clarification by Bob in which if a city builds a wall and in the likely event the barbarians show up to pillage the island of Cataan then the wall itself does not protect your city. The city is still reduced to a settlement and the wall piece removed from the map board. So the ONLY advantage to building a wall for your city is to be able to hold 2 additional resource cards in your hand before pirates (will a roll of a 7) take half your deck if you hold more than 7 resource cards. Each wall built under each city thus increases the number of cards held in your hand by 2 for a grand total 13 cards before pirates rip you off. Still a good deal however, not as protective of the city as I would like! Change of rules anyone?

Well, as the game got going I kept scoring pretty well with my "5-8" combo and was able to build enough roads to claim the longest road. In all fairness, Bob did claim the longest-road mantle for awhile before I claimed it from him on a permanent basis for the duration of the game. Bob unfortunately was in the thick of things by being sandwiched between Tim and Wayne, thus boxing himself in and unable to truly breakout and claim more land with which to build additional cities.

Wayne made good by hiring the most powerful knight on the board and fending off the barbarians to claim "Defender Of Cataan" twice for 2 easy victory points. Bob unfortunately lost a city to barbarian pillaging as I believe Ross did as well. In addition, Wayne would have played additional "progress" cards however, all of us with the exception of Bob, labored under the delusion that we could only play one progress card at a time (not my fault). Actually, according to the official rules, we can play as many progress cards as we like! I think the mix-up occurred when I was reading the regular Settlers Of Cataan rule when I read outloud that only one "development" card could be played which is true if we were playing the original game. As it was, we were playing Cities & Knights and thus I was blamed for this misunderstanding. It really was Bob's responsibility since it was he who was in charge of keeping us informed, if you ask me (ha ha). At any rate, I don't think we truly missed out on any really big opportunities to screw over our fellow Cataan players with unsavory and detrimental progress cards as we discovered this anomaly midway through the game.

In the meantime, Ross as the Chicago-street agitator that he is, insisted on playing progress cards that tended to tax his neighbors by siphoning off resource cards from each player much to our collective chagrin especially for Bob since apparently he suffered the most by Ross's excesses. Tim on the other hand kept finding himself in economic dry spots as he kept on missing out on rolls that would have benefited him had he not listened to me earlier and placed his settlement on a different number.

As the game continued I found myself in the lead however, as we neared the end of the game I suddenly found myself in a dry spell as well and was coming up short on resource and commodity cards. On top of this, Bob insisted on placing the robber on my "8" hex thus for nearly 3 to 4 times was deprived of resource and commodity cards from that hex. Why he didn't try to screw Ross with the robber I'll never know but my hide has been thoroughly chapped, I must say. Finally, Tim surreptitiously moved into the lead and suddenly he won the game with 13 total points. I came in second with 10. Wayne got 8 points with Ross at 6. I believe Bob got 5 points for last place.

Everyone played tenaciously as it went longer than I thought it would. Great job everyone! As far as the rolls recorded by Tim it was realized that the number "7" and "8" came up the most each being rolled 12 times. The "6" was rolled 9 times and amazingly the "5" was only rolled 7 times. In other games, I swear to you, it comes up more often than it did this last game. A total of 67 rolls were made before end of game. Surprisingly, the "12" and "11" were each rolled 4 times which everyone has agreed would have to be considered an outlier.

With the 5-6 player expansion, I suspect we'll be seeing this game more often. See ya next month.