There’s a very good chance that you’ve played — or are, at least, aware of — The Settlers of Catan, a German-born board game which has sold over 11 million copies worldwide. If you’ve played it, you know how clever and fun it is, and if you haven’t, you may remember how excited everybody was when they heard it was being released for Xbox Live Arcade. The bottom line is, Settlers of Catan is an extremely good game and is frequently cited when discussing the modern board game industry. It’s popular enough to have gone digital in a number of forms, from XBLA to N-Gage to blatant rip-offs in Second Life. Did you know, however, that there’s an entire free-to-play MMORPG based on Catan? Probably not, given the extremely low population of the game world, and the complete lack of press for the game. It’s called Catan Online World, and has actually been around since late 2002, though the North American (i.e. English) version only launched earlier this year. Just imagine it — an entire game world full of players who have already made every conceivable variant of the “wood for sheep” joke.
Catan Online World (henceforth referred to un-ironically as COW), having been designed for early-21st century PCs, is extremely minimal in terms of graphics and sound, but the flipside is that it’s extremely low in terms of necessary machine power. Any modern PC is more than adequate to handle COW, and so is any modern OS; the entire game is available for Windows, Mac, and even Linux, with one exception (one non-essential game add-on is handled through a secondary, Windows-only client).
Once inside COW, all graphics and interfaces are handled through Java and colorful 2D graphics, whose colonial European style meshes quite nicely with the traditional Catan motif. Players can generate an avatar through the usual method, producing a reasonable variety of appearances through combinations of provided face, hair, and accessory selections. With your new Catan persona at the ready, you can thus leap directly into the game — if you feel like shooting yourself in the foot.
COW is not a game to be picked up and played right away. This is not to say that it’s completely inaccessible, but there is a lot of required knowledge in order to make any real headway, and the game never holds your hand or fully explains what’s going on. COW assumes you know what you’re doing, which can be a real detriment when it turns out that you don’t. In addition, the in-game tutorials require the player to actively engage them, and rather than slowly explaining each new game mechanic as they are introduced, they simply hammer the player with the full volume of knowledge all at once. It can be daunting for newcomers, and experienced gamers who feel sure that they can handle all things MMO may foolishly skip past them. Likewise, the in-game board games — the main activity to be found within COW — do not contain tutorials; instead, an abstract ruleset is provided all at once upon beginning a game. Taking the time to read these will likely just confuse players who are trying to absorb too much at once, and frustrate their fellow players who have to wait for them. In a somewhat odd choice, there is actually a selection of helpful, interactive, step-by-step tutorials for the board games, but they’re located outside COW, on a separate website. COW’s hands-off approach to guiding new players may prove frustrating for the gamer who is expecting to pick up and play from the get-go, especially owing to the unique nature of COW’s MMO elements.
I must admit, in writing this review, that I don’t feel I was able to adequately experience the over-arching meta-game that is COW. To properly explore the game world would require several weeks, possibly even months. This is not, however, owing to the amount of content contained therein; it is because COW forces you to play for weeks on end in order to advance. Amassing wealth and resources in COW is not a matter of more time spent in-game, it is a matter of time elapsed in the real world. You read right — COW has a forced pace dictated by the passage of actual calendar time. Grinders and speed-levelers need not apply. As a matter of fact, more than half of your in-game rewards don’t even require your participation. If you have an account in the game, congratulations; at the end of each week you will have received 63% of your potential maximum wealth just for existing.
Here’s how it works: COW, as befitting a game centered around The Settlers of Catan, revolves around the collection (and subsequent spending) of the five traditional Catan resources, namely, wood, bricks, sheep, grain, and ore. Once each real-world day, you will be given one of these resources. That’s 7 resources you’ll receive each week with zero effort — you don’t even have to log in each day to receive them. If you have played so much as a single board game during the week, at the end of the week you’ll get one extra resource; you get two if you’ve played five or more games. There’s also an incentive to actually win the board games: one win during the week is worth yet another bonus; three wins gets you two resources. In total, that’s a maximum gain of 11 resources per week — and no more. Considering even the most basic purchases in COW (a nicer house, some snazzier clothes) will cost you four or five resources apiece, this means it’s going to take you several weeks to start advancing to the upper echelons of society, and no amount of extra play time can change that.
This non-traditional method of advancement is a double-edged sword in a wide number of ways. For one thing, it removes any benefit (and thus incentive) for grinding, keeping all players on relatively equal footing. Even the most cunning strategist in the world can only get two more resources per week than someone who takes the time to merely play one game of Settlers on each weekday. On the other hand, this is likely going to frustrate the aforementioned power-levellers or achievement junkies — gamers who are used to immediate gratification may be turned off by COW’s deliberately glacial pace. This also raises a number of questions when one considers that COW’s premium content is only accessible through a traditional monthly subscription fee (which actually fluctuates for American gamers, due to being priced in Euros). On the one hand, this may repel players who feel cheated by the inability to advance at their own pace and get their money’s worth. On the other, it makes no illusions about the perceived value of a subscription, since that fee gets you exactly the same thing every month — no more, no less. It’s worth noting, in fact, that the meta-game MMO elements are only accessible to premium players. As with every element of the game, it’s vital that you familiarize yourself with the rules and caveats before getting yourself in over your head.
An exploration of the game rules will reveal quite a bit of content available for folks who really want to immerse themselves in the meta-game. If you have the patience for it, you can build up your house and get nice enough clothes to be able to qualify for the city council, you can accessorize your home with flowers and decorations, and you can even participate in your local civics through an out-of-game forum. In addition, the management of those carefully-portioned resources looks to get harder and harder as time goes by: In an interesting Prisoner’s Dilemma, one can spend one’s resources either on one’s own home and appearance, or one can donate them to the city guard and other public works. If you don’t improve yourself, then you look like a bum and are denied access to better treatment by the NPCs, but if not enough people donate to the city guard, then thieves and arsonists will strike the town, thus harming everyone collectively. I have to admit to not adequately reviewing this portion of the game — it would take several weeks longer to really experience it, and now you know why.
This isn’t to say that a premium account is needed to have a good time in COW. If you don’t care about the meta-game, in fact, a free account still allows you to make an avatar and play full games of Settlers of Catan with the entire game population, as often as you like. You’ll also get access to the Settlers Card Game (the aforementioned Windows-only portion), and a handful of single-player browser games. A premium account, on the other hand, besides opening up the slow-moving MMO meta-game, raises the number of available board games to over two dozen, if you include the 18 or so which are variants on the basic Settlers game. Most of them are distinct enough to be called their own game — beyond the obvious inclusion of the popular Cities & Knights and Seafarers expansion sets, COW contains nearly every customization, expansion, or variation of Catan to have ever existed. I consider myself well-versed in Catan, and there were well over a dozen types in COW I had never even heard of. One scenario puts a canal down the center of the island, another one uses the Catan rules to recreate the Trojan War, and one even involves recovering treasure from an island full of dragons. Seasoned Catan experts will find themselves rediscovering the game in any number of ways, most of which are definitely worth at least one try.
If, in fact, you think you’ve mastered all Catan has to offer, you should check out MultiCatan — a six-player variant with elements of Seafarers where you don’t know where the other players are (you have to discover them), and you don’t even take turns. That’s right – simultaneous Catan play, on a board that would stretch clear off your coffee table. I would love to see this recreated in real life somehow.
Holy crap, that’s a lot of Catan.
Rounding out the selection are a handful of other games by Catan designer Klaus Teuber, most of which will be familiar to board game aficionados — Elasund, Domaine, Realm of the Desert Sons (an Entdecker variant) to name a few. Each game whisks you out of the MMO world and into a private board, where the game is handled in its entirety through a simple (if not always straightforward) interface. The games are simple enough to play if you know what you’re doing, but the first time through, some of the commands can be mildly confusing. Simple animations and blinking board areas do an adequate job of communicating what’s going on, though if you happen to turn your head or leave the PC for a minute, you may miss a few crucial moves. Every game, however, has made the jump to digital completely intact, and are generally enhanced by the journey; the strategic, resource-management elements inherent to all of Teuber’s games are made much quicker and easier when there’s a machine handling the stuff like shuffling out cards, keeping track of the ever-shifting points, and so on. A game of Settlers, which typically takes no less than 30-40 minutes in real life, can go by twice as fast in digital form, and the same holds true for the full catalog here.
This brings us to another issue that always crops up in online board games: drop-outs. Even at its increased pace, a game of Settlers is a 20-30 minute commitment, and a lot can go wrong in that time. Connections can drop, players can have personal emergencies, or they can just plain ragequit like jerks, leaving you with an unfinished game. COW does not, as other online games do, fill in the vacant seat with an AI and proceed with the game. It will, however, re-post your game as “unfinished” in the tavern (lobby) area, and anybody at all can request to take the absentee’s position. This is actually a rather nice idea; it gives the remaining players control over who rejoins the game (if they happen to know, for example, that the missing player is on his way back), and in the case of permanent departures, there’s usually at least a few players on hand willing to jump right in and help the rest of the table get some closure. In addition, it eliminates the risk of a poor AI ruining the game by trading that last resource to the guy with 9 victory points.
On the other hand, I can’t let it go unsaid: I saw a whole lot of the “unfinished game” feature, not due to poor sportsmanship, but due to stability issues with the client. I don’t think I managed to get through a single game in COW where at least one player wasn’t forced to log out and rejoin the table because their client had locked up in the middle of their turn. At best, this is a minor inconvenience, but I had at least one occasion where I found the table had completely emptied in my absence after the fourth consecutive crash. In addition, there are certain parts of the game where the American version is just plain incomplete — calling up a help file presents a few screens still in the original German. A few missed translations here and a few bugs there, and the game’s shortcomings can start to really impact the play experience.
In the end, Catan Online World is a number of things. It is undoubtedly different than any game out there; an MMO fueled by board games whose RPG elements advance through time rather than effort. It contains quite a bit of content, gameplay-wise, assuming that you’re prepared to accept board games as the entire scope and breadth of that gameplay. It is fairly engaging yet highly difficult to approach. It contains a relatively complex meta-game but a sadly unpolished interface and client. Is it worth playing?
For free, absolutely. I would absolutely recommend signing up for an account and enjoying unlimited free Settlers of Catan. Is the premium account worth it? I don’t know that the majority of gamers will be prepared to accept paying a monthly fee for a time-based meta-game with strictly limited advancement. On the other hand, you get twenty-odd different board games. Those, alone, are worth a few bucks — though, bear in mind, the price will fluctuate from month to month since it’s in Euros.
I know it’s kind of a cop-out to say “It’s for fans of Catan,” but in this case it’s absolutely true. Playing Settlers of Catan will be roughly 80% of what you do here, so if you don’t care for Settlers, you’ll hate COW. If you like Settlers, though, I’d say buy yourself one month’s worth here. Just one. You’ll get to check out the whole catalog in that time, and they’re worth at least one playthrough — if for no other reason than they might clue you in to a few good board games you can play in the real world.
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