If you walk into Dice and Drizzle on a Friday evening around eight and hear raised voices, someone has almost certainly just refused to trade sheep. Catan is the game that turned table talk into an art form, and our Friday night regulars have elevated it to something approaching theatre.
How to Play
Catan (formally The Settlers of Catan) is a resource-management and trading game for three to four players. The board is made of hexagonal terrain tiles — forests, pastures, fields, hills, mountains, and one desert — each assigned a number token. Players begin by placing two settlements on intersections where three hexes meet. On each turn the active player rolls two dice; every hex whose number matches produces its resource (wood, wool, grain, brick, or ore) for all players with a settlement or city adjacent to it. Players spend resources to build roads, new settlements, cities (which double production), and development cards. The robber — activated whenever a seven is rolled or a Knight card is played — blocks one hex and lets you steal a resource from a neighbour. Trading is entirely open: you can offer any deal to any player at any time during your turn. First to ten victory points wins.
Our Experience
Last month Dmitri built a road network so extensive that he cut off three players from the longest road. He had promised each of them individually that he would not. He had also promised Yuki a sheep for access to the port. He did not deliver the sheep. Yuki spent the next forty minutes moving the robber exclusively onto Dmitri's ore hex. Dmitri finished second. The Friday night regulars have a house rule now: promises made during Catan are not morally binding, but they are recorded in a little notebook kept behind the bar, and the ledger is read aloud at the start of each session.