Fanboy Analysis of Geek & Sundry’s Tabletop: Settlers of Catan

I don’t play this version of Settlers of Catan anymore with my REAL GAMER FRIENDS. We only play what we call “vanilla” Settlers when we’re introducing newbies to the gaming hobby. Like Wil Wheaton was doing here. And so I wonder: Wil, do you play the Settlers Cities & Knights version? Because you should know that’s the only way to play this game. Really.

Anyway, here is my John Madden-ish rundown of last week’s episode of Tabletop (see my first post about this cool new internet show here), and this time around I think Wil pretty much summed up their game of Settlers of Catan in one profound sentence: “The Robber is a dick.”

The show gave us a statistic about halfway through the episode that I think anyone wanting to play the game should know: seven, the number that makes the Robber do his thing in Settlers, SHOULD only come up about 18% of the time. But these are dice, and dice are fickle, and in this game the Robber reared his ugly head about 29% of the time. Really, the Robber to me represents a negative play experience, but I see no other way to deal with the unfairness that “7″ spaces on the board would represent. So I deal.

But yeah, he’s a dick. And yeah, we’re assuming the Robber is male.

Besides the proliferation of sevens in this particular game of Settlers, three other things struck me about this episode.

First was Wil’s insistence on making the “wheat on” pun work. I’m not going to say anything else about it; it just stood out….

Next was that, after two episodes, Tabletop obviously has a formula: Wil sits down and plays with one white guy, one Asian guy, and one white woman. I personally look forward to when a black dude plays a game with him (although I’m gonna shake my head while simultaneously laughing if they play something like Betrayal at House on the Hill and the black dude bites it first).

Also, I think Wil ought to reach out to the real gaming community and have a couple of fat guys on the show.

Although what he REALLY needs to do is have someone on the show who will laugh at his jokes about having wood. He made the joke that pretty much every person in my gaming community has made at some point, and it fell flat on his audience of fellow gamers. C’mon. “I’ve got wood for sheep” is one of the funniest lines EVER in the world of gaming. It’s a lot funnier than “wheat on” puns… which I won’t mention.

Finally, I’m gonna disparage James Kyson’s game play. I have NO IDEA how intelligent Kyson is in real life, and maybe he was just acting for this episode, but holy shit he played poorly.

Example #1: Early on, Wil was offering him two bricks for one wheat. The camera aimed at Kyson’s hand and we saw that he had two woods, a brick, a wheat, and a sheep. We’d also just seen that Kyson was lacking roads and was getting cut off by Neil Grayston. Had he traded the wheat away for the two brick, he’d have been able to slap down TWO roads and get out of his corner, AND he’d have had three quarters of what he need to build a Settlement once he was out. You have to build roads early on in Settlers, folks, because you can’t spread out otherwise. Kyson neglected to do this and turned down Wil’s generous offer.

Example #2: He says at the end that Neil Grayston came out of nowhere with the win. “I didn’t see it coming,” he said. Well, the episode was truncated, and we the audience didn’t see everything, but even we saw Grayston get:

An additional Settlement for 1 point.

A City for 2 points.

The Largest Army for 2 points.

And the Longest Road for 2 points.

Seven points, James Kyson. You only need 10. You didn’t see that coming?

So… Neil Grayston, the “white guy who’s not Wil Wheaton” won. Which is obviously also part of the formula, because LAST episode Sean Plott, “the white guy who’s not Wil Wheaton” won.

I dunno, man.

I’d like to make one more point, which is effectively a final plug for the Cities & Knights variant of this game: A lot of times in games of vanilla Settlers, we found that once you became a clear front-runner the way Neil Grayston did, experienced players simply stopped trading with you. This gets frustrating to the front-runner, AND it pisses off people if you DO break down and trade with the front-runner AKA The Great Satan. Generally speaking, the person who’s in SECOND place has the better shot - he or she is within grasp of the win, and people are more willing to trade with him or her. There’s a lot of these “hang back a bit” games, and they get old after a while.

With Cities & Knights there are several paths to victory AND there are work-arounds for the front-runner, should the trading well dry up. It’s a more complicated game, for sure, but it’s far less tedious in the end game, and the wins are much more satisfying.

Especially if you manage to get your Wheat On.

Did I say that out loud?