Growing up, the coat closet in my parents' house was the go-to place when one was bored.  Amidst the little used coats and jackets (it was South Carolina after all, so there was little use for my father's big tweed overcoat) was a shelf with a tall stack of long thin boxes with names on the side - names like Scrabble, Monopoly, Risk, Life, Clue, and others.  If it was late, or raining, or just too bloody hot to be outside and you had at least one other person who was looking for something to do, you could pass some rather enjoyable time playing one of these board games.  

My love of these kinds of classic games came from that time, learning to enjoy the time spent with friends and family and learning a few life skills along the way.  How many of us learned some of our basic logical skills from figuring out that the lead pipe was the murder weapon in Clue or got our first real taste of global power struggles from Risk along with a rather skewed viewpoint on the tactical strength of holding Australia during a war?  Or how many of us learned more than a few words playing Scrabble or learned tactical thinking from chess?  All of these things snuck into our lives while we spent just 45 minutes to a couple of hours waiting for a rain cloud to pass or waiting for Johnny Carson to come on during the summer.

As I have grown older, I have continued to enjoy these games and have even been fortunate enough to have added a few to the mix.  One that I have only recently been introduced to though which has been out for quite a few years is the game The Settlers of Catan.  Introduced in 1995 in Germany, the game was created by Klaus Teuber and has spawned many variations in the years since its inception.  The standard game allows for three to four players to get in on the action, though there are expansions that allow up to six to play.  

The game revolves around the players colonizing the mythical island of Catan.  This is done by gathering resources which can be used to create settlements, build roads, upgrade settlements into cities, and to collect purchase resource cards.  The island itself is represented by a series of hexagonal tiles which are randomly placed to create the land with each hexagon representing a type of terrain that produces one of five resource types (brick, grain, lumber, ore, or wool).  On each player's turn, they roll two dice and the result is matched to numbers randomly assigned to the hex tiles on the board.  If you have a settlement or city adjacent to a hex whose number has been rolled, you receive a resource card of the type that the hex represents.  These can be used to add to your expanding settlement or traded with other players to get resources you may not have access to.

The ultimate goal of the game is collect ten victory points.  These points are earned by having settlements (worth 1 point) or cities (worth 2 points) and through additional achievements like having the longest road or the largest army.  Some of these are earned through trading resources for resource cards. The resource cards are sort of equivalent to the Community Chest cards in Monopoly - each card has a random benefit, from giving you knight cards that allow you to steal a resource card from an opponent and builds your army to civic improvements like universities, churches, and In-And-Out Burger stands.

Initial exposure to the game generally leads to a rather blank look on the faces of new players and the more experienced players going "Let's just start playing and you will get the idea."  After a couple of turns, people pick up on the game play and soon find themselves battling with others for the longest road or being their most persuasive and calling in personal debts to get someone to accept two wool cards for a stone.  

The original game has expanded into a whole series of games adding in elements of exploration (Seafarers of Catan), city management (Cities and Knights of Catan), and even beating back the occasional horde of barbarians (Catan: Traders and Barbarians).  The series updated itself with a sci-fi feel with Starfarers of Catan and dropped back into the past at the same time by adding titles like Settlers of the Stone Age and Struggle for Rome.

Ultimately, this is an excellent game to play with a few friends and enjoy an hour to an hour and half of fun with a minimal learning curve.  One of the advantages of the game is that it does not require extensive knowledge (like some trivia games) and while strategy plays a part in the game, there is also an element of luck so it is not simply a game of skill.

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