I taught a couple of my coworkers, Mary and Kelly (Baker), how to play Settlers of Catan at the bar down the street from my apartment this afternoon. I front-loaded the explanation of the rules a lot, but otherwise I feel I got through them pretty efficiently, and the game went pretty smoothly.

I was reminded though how frustrating this game can be the first time you play it, when you aren’t sure where to place your first settlements. They make those 6’s and 8’s red for a reason, but if you don’t realize how important the frequencies are, your ship can sink before it leaves the dock.

I got a pretty strong advantage early on, and held onto it for the rest of the game. In a game with more than two players with any kind of interaction built into the rules to help (or hinder) meeting objectives, collusion and ganging up are integral to balancing out blind luck, overt strength, and experience. I take it as a compliment that I am frequently singled out as the guy not to trade with, or the guy to attack most often, because it means that they view my skill as an inherent threat. And, again, this is an integral part of a game: take down the leader.

This doesn’t seem to happen very often in Settlers of Catan, at least so far as I’ve played. People are far too willing to trade with the leader, probably because the leader is most likely to have what the other players need. Contrast this with Risk, where the leader doesn’t have anything special to offer the other players except for not to attack them, but that’s neither guaranteed nor particularly appealing psychologically. In other words, the temptation to break an alliance in Risk is much lower, if only emotionally, than the temptation to break an alliance in Settlers of Catan.

It may simply be that my friends and I are not yet especially savvy at evaluating trades, and so we aren’t particularly aware of how much a trade with the leader will hurt us. Maybe when we get a better sense of this, embargos against the leader will hold longer.

On a related note, yesterday at Barnes & Noble I saw a book in the math section called N-Person Game Theory. It’s a topic I’ve mused about a great deal, but never really tried working out nor doing any research into. My interest comes exactly from games like Settlers and Risk, though I first started wondering about it when I was writing my Monopoly paper in grad school, and wondered what effect the existence of other players in the game should have on the evaluation of a trade, and how their anticipated trading strategies can be taken into account.

I’m going to start reading the sample of the book on my Kindle, and I’ll probably end up buying it. The only reason I didn’t buy the hard copy yesterday was my imminent move to California: I’d rather not accumulate any more stuff until then.

Parting thought: How effectively can you form a coalition in Kill Doctor Lucky? It seems the only means of doing this is for each player to sacrifice a little of their time to watch after the leader, which is probably the one with the most spite tokens, and possibly with the most cards.