Settlers

It was interesting to see a bunch of different, well thought out variants for Settlers.

My group played the 2-teams-of-2 variant, first with a regular sized board and then with the 5-6 player expansion added for more space.

The other team seemed to be at a clear disadvantage because one of their players had miss-categorized himself higher than he should have. I could tell something was wrong when he tried to place his second settlement 1 away from his teammate after he first tried placing his second road and settlement in different locations. Later, when he needed a cheat-card to remember how to build a settlement, I realized why my team was doing so well. At first I thought it was just the fact that I'm getting married to my teammate, but that was probably only part of the reason we got to 17 points so fast.

We really saw the importance of good initial settlement placement in that game, and so in the second game the other team chose much more carefully and stayed ahead of us by 1-2 visible points for much of the game. (Not counting the hidden largest army waiting in the ranks.)

While we were playing I kept wondering how a few simple rule adjustments would impact the game. For example, what if longest road and largest army were shared between the teammembers. Would it make sense to allow the teammates to use each other's roads to build places, or to let them build 1 away from each other using a double wide road to link themselves? How could those rule changes be made fair and consistent?

I look forward to trying some more of these variants after the class has finished with my friends who are abroad this interim.