davegruen.com

Settlers of Catan is quite possibly the greatest game created in the last century.  A friend of mine turned me on to the game about 4 or 5 years ago.  I loved it immediately.  If you’ve never played it before, run, don’t walk to your nearest gaming store and go buy Settlers of Catan along with the expansion Cities & Knights.  Well now, you can play Settlers of Catan online.  The basic game is free, but to play more of the advance games, you have to pay a small fee per month.  It’s well worth it.  Once you’ve played Cities & Knights, it’s really hard to go back to the basic game.

50% of the results of the game are determined during the placement of your settlements and cities.

With Cities & Knights, there are a lot of great possibilities.  Space is at a premium.  You have to fight for land and possitioning.

There are a few difficulties in playing it… but they are all small.  Most of the players are in Germany, so it’s hard to find a lot of good players in the evening in the US, because it is probably in the wee hours of the morning in Germany.  Plus, a lot of players only speak German, so it’s hard to communicate with a lot of players.

There are a lot of variations on the game that you can play like this "Enchanted Lands" game.

What a great thing.  Settlers of Catan is fantastic.  Since our family get-togethers are few and far between, this can fill in the gaps between family games.  I highly recommend it.