Game Review Week 5
Games Played: Settlers of Catan and Bonanza
This past game we played Settlers of Catan and Bonanza.
Settlers of Catan combines several aspects noted in previous games which include, board building, cards, and growing personal resources. The set up of the game is all apart of the fun-the randomization of tiles and dice chips allows each game to be slightly different. This hexagonal board is broken up into territories of different landscapes which therefore produce different resources. The resources are stored and traded in order to build settlements. The overall objective of this game is to reach the most amount of points. You gain points by having settlements, cities, roads, armies, and resources—each having a different value. The whole premises of this game is realistic in that you can have a city without supplies and you can’t expand your territory without roads. In this case, not only is it a building game of the board, but building in terms of a “kingdom/territory” if you will. The main leveling out factor is that you can only obtain the resources in which your settlement/city is on. Therefore in order to gain the other resources you must revert to trading among other players or trading with the bank. The trading aspect of this game probably assisted the most by allowing for more interactivity between players and strategizing so you do not only focus on yourself and your cards but the other players as well. The many different components of this game made it fun and definitely a Gateway game. I knew that Settlers of Catan was a widely popular game, but having never played it myself I didn’t quite understand why. Although there were different parts of the game and it wasn’t as simple as rolling a die and letting the board do the work, it was simple in a way that it was easy to understand and made sense, mostly because it followed standard economical fashion.
Bonanza is a trading card game which involves strictly beans. The entire deck is made up of several different types of beans-some with more cards than others. The amount of cards per bean determines its value. The overall goal is to get as many coins as possible by the end of the game. However, obtaining them and trying to win proves slightly more challenging. The main difference between Bonanza and something as basic as go fish is its speed and method. To break it down, the beans are worth coins (but you must have so many beans in order to get any coins). Therefore you must continuously/directly add on to your bean chain in the hopes of “growing” enough beans to get coins. The game gets switched up because of 2 simple rules. 1: you MUST always play the top card in your hand. and 2: You can only have 3 beans growing at a time. What breaks this down slightly is that the game does allow for trading among players-however ALL new obtained cards must be planted as soon as they are received. Because there is constant movement Bonanza is a fast paced game where anybody has the opportunity to win. While it is more complex than Go Fish, I’d put Bonanza on the lower end of the spectrum in terms of it being a Gateway game. This is because it was easy to learn, luck involved, and a theme. However there wasn’t much as semblance and the duration lasted maybe 30-40 minutes where as typical Gateway games last 1 hour to 1.5 hours.