Two-player Settlers game with Richard

Yesterday evening, Richard needed a break from work, so we played a game of Settlers, using our usual two-player house rules. We set up the board in the usual way, and made our initial placements:


Nothing too controversial there. I (playing orange) started on the hex next to the 9-ore, seeing that, once again, ore was likely to be in short supply, and chose the boundary with two grain tiles. But since we make three initial placements in the two-player game, and only two of us are competing for spaces anyway, it's easy enough to gain access to all five resources with a reasonable range of numbers.

The only change from my usual strategy is that two of my placements were further from the coast. I like to get a couple of harbours as soon as possible, but this time the better places were more central on Catan island. I did fairly quickly take the sheep harbour, although I didn't get much of a chance to use it. Richard had far more sheep than I did.

It was a fairly fast-paced game. We're quite evenly matched now, and use similar strategies. Usually Richard ends up with the longest street, and I get the largest army, but this time it happened the other way around. As so often, I got in the lead - by one point - fairly early, which meant that almost every time a 7 was rolled, he controlled the robber and took an extra resource. I don't like this rule, but it does make the game much more even rather than allowing one person to stay in the lead throughout.

I won, with 17 points to Richard's 14:


However, he should really have won the game!

Towards the end, neither of us was remembering to count points. There was a stage at which he had 11 points on the board, and both the extra cards. He also had a hidden victory point card, which means that he had 16 points and so should have declared himself the winner.

At the time, I had 13 points (having built all my cities and settlements) and was basically buying cards. I kept hoping I might eventually gain the largest army card. I did manage to pick up two victory point cards, which was good, but didn't help my knight playing... then I suddenly realised that since Richard's longest street was only 7, I could play three streets - with a bit of trading - to join up my two sections of streets, to make 9, then take the longest street card and reach 17 points.

He said that I won, since I actually showed that I had the points... but I think he did. Or should have, anyway. He should also, probably, have played a couple of extra streets to make his longest one unassailable - but didn't get around to it. It's a mistake we both tend to make.

This shows the final board, with our development cards too: