Your opponents can then make their own trading offers, which are represented by floating speech bubbles next to their avatars. When trading, you simply select which goods you're willing to trade, and then which goods you want in return. On it, you can see how many resources you have, as well as icons for rolling dice, building houses or roads and, of course, trading, which is the heart and soul of any Catan game. All of the player controls are housed in a little movable tableau area, which should be familiar to anyone who's played Catan before. Once you decide where to put a settlement, a house will then be built before your eyes, as well as the accompanying road. So, as you might expect, the green locations are snapped up pretty quickly, and you have to be strategic enough to get a good spot while they're available. More desirable locations - usually an intersection with a higher probability of getting goods - will be marked in green. If an intersection is available and represents a legal move, it will light up in white. The first thing you're tasked to do is to basically set up the board, whereby players take turns to decide where to place their first two settlements at the intersections of the game's hexagon tiles. An Asmodee Digital representative told me that Klaus Teuber, the inventor of Catan, actually provided substantial notes and input on how each AI personality should behave and play - some might be more expansionist, while others might stay closer to one side of the island. In a single-player environment, all of your opponents would instead be represented by AI personalities that you might recognize from previous Catan games (Candamir, Lin, Mary Anne and Nassir). The avatars and hands floated and moved around as the people gestured and talked. The players with the Rift had two hands (to represent their two controllers), while those with the Go only had one hand. I was a viking helmet, while the other players were a cat, a wizard (represented by a wizard hat) and a masquerade mask. I love the tiny little details like the trees in the forest, the sheep in the meadows and even a mine cart in the ore-filled mountains.Įach of us were represented by different floating avatars. You can even change the artwork on the walls if you like. If you don't like the setting, there's also an option to swap out to a Japanese-inspired environment complete with shoji screens. Yes, we were all playing Catan, while also apparently being on the island of Catan. In the middle of that room was the four of us, sitting around a virtual table, with a virtual Catan board laid out in front of us. Once I strapped it on my head, I was transported to what appeared to be a large room, with the iconic Catan sunset appearing in the distance. I was set up to play the game with two other journalists as well as an Oculus spokesperson, with me on one of the Go headsets. You can play the same game across the different headsets. One of the upsides of Catan VR is that it's compatible with all Oculus systems - it's playable on Samsung's Gear VR, the Rift and the upcoming Go. The Catan demo in the Oculus booth was set around the aforementioned fake board game table, with an Oculus headset set up in each of the four sides. To be honest, I was skeptical that Catan in VR could capture the feeling of playing a real board game, but I was willing to give it a shot. It was even set up in a special area in the Oculus booth, complete with a giant mural of the Catan board on a wall and a fake board game table set in the middle. That's because the makers of Catan have partnered with publisher Asmodee Digital and developer Experiment 7 to create, you guessed it, a VR version of the popular board game, and release it at the show. It got to a point where, frankly, I played it so much that I got sick of it, and ended up deleting the app and giving the game away.īut at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, I was ready to reacquaint myself with an old friend. I too bought a copy for myself, and when the app version came out, I played it non-stop. And, it turns out, many others did as well - as of 2015, more than 22 million copies of the game (created in 1995) have sold worldwide. I didn't really know much about board games, aside from old classics like Monopoly, so when a friend brought it out at a party I was intrigued. Just dividing by 12 would have undercounted by $70\,560$ possibilities.The first time I played Settlers of Catan was probably 2006. For reference, the board for this game is a large regular hexagon consisting of 19 regular hexagonal tiles in a grid like:
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