Once a month, Rogues Gallery does “Gaming with Rogues” which a more focused, regular boardgame meeting, namely to introduce people to new stuff. I finally made a huge effort to check out Settlers of Catan which has been a mainstream success for the last decade. Hell, you can even buy it at Target.
On the surface it appears to be a simplified version of Civilization (not the Sid Meier jazz, he really ripped off an old Avalon Hill game). It definitely incorporates those elements but the comparison I made is likely to be lost on most people.
I’ll give a quick description. There’s a land called Catan. The players each get two settlements and two roads on the board. The dice (2d6) are rolled to determine which resource cards each player may draw if their settlement straddles a hex with the number the dice yielded. Players collect the resources to build more settlements, castles, roads or whatever. Sometimes they can trade with each other or exchange four cards of the same thing for one of something else. First player to 10 points wins; settlement = 1, castle = 2, longest road = 2 and biggest army = 2.
There’s a ton of licensed versions (Star Trek) and expansions, namely a way to have up to six players. I think I’ll shoot for the basic set, entice Somara and others to player, see where it goes from there. Somara thankfully is an easier sell than my ex-girlfriend Carrie which why Empire Builder was such a surprise hit with the latter.