Catan - Single Player Impressions

It was with a certain amount of trepidation that I downloaded "Catan" for Xbox Live. After all, in my opinion this is one of the best board games to be released, and high on my list of favourites. After the download I immediately launched into a four player multi-player game against the AI.

The game board is pleasing and can be viewed using two skins. The "original" is more representative of the actual board game and although not a graphical tour-de-force it's accurate to the original game, clean and uncluttered. If you wish you can use the alternative "real world" skin to graphically overhaul the look of the game. However, so far I've found that when using this skin it's much harder to get an immediate visual feedback of resources and player positions. Whichever skin you choose you can rotate or zoom the board to get a closer look at a particular area.

The rules of the game are all accurately modelled, and if you so wish you can set various house rules when playing multi-player over Xbox live. Trading has been nicely implemented and you can easily offer certain trades, ask for resources, or reject offers. Your resource cards are all clearly laid out on the screen and development cards you own are displayed in a separate screen you can call up.

There are a few statistical extras that I found useful; for example you can view the revenue value for each tile corner, or the total value of each resource type making it easy to see what commodity will be in demand. You may even view a dice roll bar graph if you so desire!

Three levels of AI difficulty are available: "Easy", "Moderate" and "Hard". Each AI opponent you face is given a "personality" from real renowned leaders such as "Alexander" or "Cleopatra" all with individual playing styles.

I would only recommend easy when learning how to play. As the setting name suggests you shouldn't have any trouble with the AI opponents. They did not seem overly aggressive and when it came to trading they were all eager to offer resources that were beneficial to me. However, on "Moderate" and "Hard" I found the AI was significantly improved. Not only did they place settlements better, but my expansion was deliberately hampered and they were not always willing to trade. This is the Catan I know and love, a fight on your hands until the bitter end when you finally clinch victory by one or two points.

All in all I would highly recommend this game, at the very least give the trial game a go. See you in Catan!

Settlers of Catan - Looking forward to live