Settlers of Catan Sucks

Last night I was hanging with some old college friends. Inevitably One of them wanted to play Settlers of Catan. They talked me into it by insisting that the board game would be but the background, a prop, a mere casual past-time, during which we would engage in pleasant and intellectually-stimulating conversation. Mostly they were hoping enough time had passed since I last played that abomination that I'd forgotten how much I hated it.

And in fact, they were right: I had forgotten how much I hate Settlers of Catan, though I quickly remembered. And this pleasant and intellectually-stimulating conversation of course never materialized--for once Settlers of Catan begins, any remotely intelligent thought grinds to a halt.

This wretched board (bored?) game is the clearest demonstration yet of the stultifying and regressive effects of trade and commerce on the other-wise boundless human intellect, as everyone's entire mental energy becomes completely occupied with trading the requisite stones and sheep for a brick to build a road in order to complete a settlement and attain the requisite "victory points" necessary to bring the whole asinine ordeal to a merciful close.

And yes, the game is as painfully convoluted and dull as that previous sentence.

There's never been an hour of Settlers of Catan that I didn't feel had been inexorably robbed from my finite number of hours on this earth, that I didn't resentfully want back.

How is Settlers of Catan like real settlement, anyways?! What colonizer has ever actually built houses on the conjunctions of randomly distributed, octagonal, mono-agricultural harvesting areas? How is this terra-forming project not determined by armed conflict on competing claims, revolts from indigenous peoples, from your own settlers, pirates, malaria and natural disasters?

See, this is how you know that this sorry excuse for entertainment was created by Germans! Please note that the Germans have never settled anything. Oh, sure, they've conquered--oh so briefly--a few long-settled neighbors; the Germans have been efficient, oh so efficient, pulling out their slide-rules and compasses in order to organize oh so precisely their modes of conquest--that is, they've treated conquest like a game of Settlers of Catan.

And the result? Failure, repeated and resounding failure, time and time again. The rest of Western Europe--England, France, Spain, Portugal, the Dutch--have all long understood that colonization is a messy, dirty, morally-ambiguous, at-times reprehensible affair. It would never occur to them to produce such a reductive, clean, insultingly-over-simplified and naive game about settlement.

At least Risk gets some blood on your hands; and Monopoly, if nothing else, acknowledges the naked and horrible avarice that guides commerce. Settlers of Catan won't even own up to its own naive convictions--it's a bland and uninspiring wish-fulfillment that doesn't even pathetically offer the vicarious thrill of global conquest.

I met this girl once who claimed that she was undefeated at Settlers of Catan. I offered my condolences that she wasn't undefeated at something that matters.