SETTLERS OF CATAN EXPANSION UPGRADE

There is no sure fire way to ensure that you win Catan, and thatвЂ™s what keeps the game balanced and interesting.Finally, you will encounter peaceful and helpful villagers who trade valuable spices to you. This is a common strategy, but it is not necessarily the optimal strategy.

SETTLERS OF CATAN EXPANSION UPGRADE

Then later in the game, resources like wheat and ore are helpful because you can upgrade your settlements to cities. For example, many players prioritize brick and lumber at the beginning of the game because those resources are conducive to expansion (i.e. There are some popular strategies that prioritize certain resources during certain phases of the game. The building costs for things like roads, settlements, cities, and development cards are distributed in such a way where a player essentially needs all the resources to thrive in the game. Luckily, there arenвЂ™t any overpowered or useless resources. So, it makes sense that you would want to settle near hexes with the resources you want. You collect these resources when the number on a hex you are adjacent to gets rolled. All the ways to acquire victory points have very similar cost/benefit ratios and these ratios dynamically change with the state of the game board and what stage you are at in the game. ItвЂ™s not the case where someone would say something like, вЂњyou can only win if you upgrade all your cities to settlementsвЂќ or вЂњdonвЂ™t bother going for the largest armyвЂќ.

There is no one dominant strategy in Catan. Draw a VP card from the Development Cards deck (1 point).

Upgrade a settlement to a city (2 points).There are many ways to acquire victory points in Catan. You win Catan by being the first player to reach 10 victory points. IвЂ™ve never felt like my game was sunk because I had to be the first or last person to place my settlement. That being said, the mechanics of Catan make it so that this asymmetry does not doom the gameвЂ™s balance. By and large, there is asymmetry in Catan since the game is sequential and some player has to go first. A snaking order is used so the players who place their first settlement before everyone else places their first have to place their second settlement after everyone else places their second. Additionally, during this initial settling phase, each player gets to place two settlements instead of just one. On the other hand, players who place their settlement later have more complete information about where other players have already settled (and can try to distance themselves to avoid future conflicts). On the one hand, the player who places the first settlement has an advantage because they get their first choice of location on the board. Therefore, itвЂ™s advantageous to settle next to tiles with commonly rolled numbers like 6 or 8, as opposed to rarer rolls like 2 or 12.Д«ecause players place their settlements sequentially, there is an inevitable asymmetry. Per the laws of probability, some dice rolls are more likely than others. For example, if you place a settlement adjacent to a forest hex with the number 9, you get to pick up one lumber card whenever a 9 is rolled during the game. Players take turns placing settlements on the crossroads between these tiles and this determines when a player gets to collect resources during the game. Before the game starts, hexagonal resource tiles randomly assemble to form the game board and a number is placed on each. If youвЂ™ve ever played Catan, you know that perhaps the most critical decision a player can make comes before the game even starts, that is, where to place your settlements. Catan game board Balance in an Asymmetric Game

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