Post originally by Clint at 2003-12-24 12:59:57
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Hello, Shannon. First, let me say that your reviews are always informative and a pleasure to read.
I wanted to share the only flaw that my game group has found that isn't mentioned in your review, and see what you think. We call it the "player left behind" problem. At a point sometime in the middle of every game, you can divide the players into two categories: "has a shot at winning" and "left behind". For us, having playing it for more than a year, it's easy to see which category each player is in. This time usually happens when the island of Catan is fully developed or soon will be, and one or more people is stuck with developing into terribly suboptimal development sites, or none at all. The game continues on, with two or three leaders struggling and conniving for the win, but for that person who got crowded out or unlucky in the first half, there are no suprises coming in the second half.
It's our only real problem with the game, but for us it's the biggest one, and enough to keep us from playing the game regularly. One of the four of us is just watching in the end stages.
Have you observed anything like this?
Again, thanks for this great review and all the others.
Post originally by Shannon Appelcline at 2003-12-24 15:18:42
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Yeah, I'd agree that it's possible for a player to be largely out of the game for the last 30 minutes or so, usually based on getting behind in the power curve or else getting badly geographically constrained.
That probably should have been in the review. However, it's less bad than other games that do the same thing because of the shorter timeframe (e.g., you might be effectively out for 30 minutes rather than hours).
Post originally by Ed Schmutz at 2004-03-24 23:21:39
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Even without modification, leaving only one player behind out of four in a one-hour game is still pretty good, and thanks to the dice-rolling randomness inherent in Settlers, it's generally not the same person each time, and even players with a poor gift for strategy can find themselves winning games thanks to some favourable rolls.
To combat the Player Left Behind" syndrome,
I read a variant on the net (and can't remember the source) that described a "food stamps" variant, where each player that didn't get resources on a roll got a marker, and the markers could be traded in for resources on the player's turn at the ratio of their VPs. At the start, players have only two VPs, and can trade markers in 2:1 for resources, with the ratio becoming much steeper as the game progresses. This gives an advantage to players not getting favourable rolls, and much more to the players that aren't winning... It creates a much more level playing field, I've found, and is a very popular variant among my friends when playing the 5-6 player version.
Linear Mode
