Catan on Xbox Live Arcade

As for an expension on my field research I wanted to play The Settlers of Catan on the xBox, because I heared a lot of good comments on it and I wanted to experience what that fuzz is all about.

The electronic version on the xBox is called Catan, which can be bought and downloaded from the xBox Live Arcade. I already knew how the game is being played and therefor I thought I could get away with just downloading the demo for free. After loading the game I quickly bumped against some annoying demo restrictions, first of all I could only play a match against the computer and second of all in the beginning of the game I wasn't allowed to pick the places for my settlements. But that all couldn't destract me from my purpose to get a feeling of playing the game.

I soon came to the conclusion that I haven't played the game for such a long time that I forgot about most of the game rules. As I didn't feel like going through the whole tutorial first I decided to go with re-discovering the game rules as we go.

The game went really quickly and the resources went all over the place, I had no idea how the trading function worked and I had no idea what the computer had done or what I should do in my turn, besides throwing the dice. Which, by the way, didn't annoyed me so much as I thought it would. You pressed a button, the 3d dice appeared and rolled over the game board (including the sound of rolling dices) and quickly stopped with a number.

After a certain amount of turns the demo version expired and asked me to buy the full game. I didn't feel satisfied with this experience and so I decided to buy the full game. Now I had the option to play against the computer as before or to play online against up to four players around the world, the decision was not hard to make.

Once online I noticed that I could plugin a microphone to my joystick and actually talk to the people in the room. This had an enormous impact on the fun I experienced while playing the game. I came across people from canada, arizona, denmark, germany but also closer to home, the netherlands. They kindly filled in the gaps I didn't know about the game rules and instead of waiting for anyone to accept your trading offer you could easily ask if someone wants to trade and you could actually negotiate.

After spending some time playing and talking to all sorts of people I came to a logic though interesting conclusion that the feeling of enjoying a game doesn't limit itself to the game rules, it's the whole experience around it.

For example I joined a game and it was filled with people from canada and they kindly wanted to answer some of my questions I had for them. One of these questions was how they experienced the dices in the game, at that time I still thought it was one dice, two dices. The guy bursted into laughter and after some time he said I sounded like Arnold Schwarzenegger, constantly saying "dices" like Arnold would. So the whole room, including me, was laughing and after that stopped he corrected me and said it was one die, two dice and I learned something. Of course he continued talking like Arnold for the rest of that round.

The thing is after I was done playing the game, I felt really good and wanted to play the game again. Besides I ended up with meeting all sorts of new people which some of them even added me to a so called friendslist on xBox.

To conclude this story I came up with some pro's and con's for the electronic game board:
(Keep in mind that for this example I didn't think of people gathering around a computer like the multi-touch would do, but purely playing solo on a PC, possibly against people online)
+ Try before you buy.
+ Tutorial to lead you through the game rules.
+ Send unbalancing issues or suggestions to the game designer.
+ Possibility to download expansions or modifications from out the community.
+ Not limited to a place, you can play against people from around the world, from their home.
+ Game elements like dice and cards won't get lost or damaged.
+ You don't need to clean up after playing.

- After a certain number has been thrown a lot, you blaim the computer. Rumours are currently being spread that the random function in Catan ain't that random, that it looks at the current game state and decides a number from that.
- You lose the actual feeling of the cards, the dice, etc.
- You can not see the person you are playing against.
- If you don't agree on certain game rules with the people you are playing with, it's mostly hard to adjust them. While with traditional board games you could come up with any kind of 'extra' game rule on the fly and after agreeying start playing with it.
- With the traditional board games people are more tempted to stay till the end while with an online version you have a high change of people leaving if they feel like they are going to lose.
- Cheat sensitive; With catan two people decided to talk to each other in private using the voice chat option on the xbox and agreed to only help each other giving each other what they needed. Besides if someone is leaving he could give all his resources to another player, giving that player an unfair advantage. The other players can't do anything about it because they are restricted to the options the game has to offer. While in traditional board games you could really look into someones eyes and say it's unfair and that you won't play further untill justice has been reached.