Collect and trade resources to build up the island of Catan in this modern classic.
Description:
In CATAN (formerly The Settlers of Catan), players try to be the dominant force on the island of Catan by building settlements, cities, and roads. CATAN® the original strategy board game. Embark on a quest to settle the island of Catan! Start by revealing Catan's many harbors and regions: pastures, fields, mountains, hills, forests, and desert. Guide your settlers to victory by clever trading and smart development. Gather resources (grain, wool, ore, brick, and lumber) to build roads, settlements and cities, and to buy development cards that will help you on your quest. Acquire your resources by rolling the dice and trading with others. But beware – you never know when the wily robber might steal some of your precious gains!
Build a Community: Whether you play as a family, a board game group, or via video conference as you stay at home, Catan is a social game that provides plenty of opportunities for player interaction. You may even find yourself exploring the exciting world of Catan tournaments.
--description from the publisher
| Time to play: | # of players: | Recommended Age: |
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| 60 to 120 minutes | 3 to 4 | 10+ |
| Complexity: | Player Dynamic: | Skill: |
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| 2.30 / 5 | Light competition | Critical Thinking, Strategy, Negotiation |
1. Community Building
2. Potential use with clients: critical thinking, strategy, and negotiation
Persuasion with Limited Sight by Alex Lascarides and Markus Guhe
Abstract: Humans face many game problems that are too large for the whole game tree to be used in their deliberations about action, and very little is understood about how they cope in such scenarios. However, when a human player’s chosen strategy is conditioned on her limited perspective of how the game might progress (Degremont et al. 2016), then it should be possible to manipulate her into changing her planned move by mentioning a possible outcome of an alternative move. This paper demonstrates that human players can be manipulated this way: in the game The Settlers of Catan, where negotiation is only a small part of what one must do to win the game thereby generating uncertainty about which outcomes to the negotiation are good and which are bad, the likelihood that a player accepts a trade offer that deviates from their declared preferred strategy is higher if it is accompanied by a description of what that trade offer can lead to.
The Effectiveness of Persuasion in The Settlers of Catan by Markus Guhe and Alex Lascarides
Abstract—We present a method for obtaining a useful symbolic model of persuasion in a complex game, where players’ preferences over the outcomes of negotiations over resources are incomplete, uncertain, and dynamic. We focus on the problem of identifying the stage in the game where successfully persuading an agent to perform a particular action will have the most impact on one’s chances to win. Our approach exploits empirical data from game simulations, where the set up allows us to investigate individual aspects of the policy in suitably controlled ways. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach within the domain of The Settlers of Catan and present some specific lessons that can be learned for this particular game, e.g. that a tipping point in the game occurs for persuasion moves that are made when the leading player reaches 7 Victory Points
Please refer to the books and articles listed on the Board Game: Home page for more readings regarding board game play and psychology.
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