Six-person Settlers of Catan

Last night, we were invited over to some friends to play Settlers, taking our set with us. They're currently borrowing a set from some other mutual friends, but that's older than ours, so it doesn't have the outer grid to hold it together, and it's in German. Of course it's always good to learn a few words from a foreign language, but how useful is it, in reality, to know that - for instance - 'Ritter' means 'knight'?

So we set up the extended version for five to six players, and placed our initial settlements.


I was fifth to place, and had Shenna playing with me. She's quite capable of playing on her own, but there were seven of us in all, so there had to be one team. We (playing orange, as I always do) chose an intersection with two wood hexes and one sheep for our first turn, since it was close to a wood harbour. Since one of the wood hexes was an 8, it seemed like a good starting point. On our second placement we had two possible intersections with our three missing resources (clay, ore and wheat) and after some discussion, chose the one nearer the coast.

We'd forgotten how crowded the board can become with six players. We'd also forgotten, for a moment, that everyone's allowed to build (if they have the exact cards) after each player has finished his or her turn. Thankfully Josh reminded us, although I expect we'd have thought about it sooner or later.

Slightly to my surprise, we were able to build a city fairly early in the game, while it took a little longer to get settlements on the two harbours we were aiming for. But after a few rounds, we were nicely in the lead: six points, while pretty much everyone else had four.

Unfortunately, that meant we were the obvious target for the robber, and in particular that nice 8-wood hex which, by then, had a city and a settlement on it.


While others bought cards, we tried to expand when we could, and never picked up so many cards that we risked losing them on a seven roll. There was no way we were going to get a long street, since our only access to clay was an 11, so we generally had to trade for it. Clay and wheat were generally in rather short supply in the game, unsurprisingly given where the numbers fell, and I knew our initial placements were not ideal. We could have bought more cards, and perhaps played a few knights - we did play one during the game - but with six players, that still leaves, potentially, five rounds without the best resource if the player next to me put the robber back - as happened when we did play the knight!

The problem with doing well early in the game is that everyone else continued to target the same person. So even when we were overtaken by both Josh (playing white) and Nicole (playing blue), the robber mostly ended up on the 8-wood hex. There were some rounds when we didn't pick up a single card.

Eventually it was a battle between Josh and Nicole. At one stage Nicole had both the largest army and the longest street, and had reached 10 points, while Josh had 8. However her street had reached its limit, whereas his had much more potential, and he eventually took the card from her, giving him 10 points. The following round, he was able - after some judicious trading - to build both a city and another settlement, making him the clear winner.