Microteach: CATAN

What follows assumes

• you know CATAN,
• what a microteach is,
• the game is already set up on the table,
• it has a valid starting situation of 2 villages and roads already set up for each player (enhance),
• there’s a sample hand laying face up in front of each player (enhance), and
• the development cards, robber and longest road and largest army plaques are hidden from view (simplify).

Microteach

The game is a race to 10 points. Players start with a couple villages. The orange player, for example has these 2 villages (point to them) each with a road (point) leading out. Blue has these (pointing). Roads provide the means to expand and place new villages (grow a legal, two-leg road and place a new village at the end). Villages can be upgraded to cities (replace the newly added village). These are worth points. Villages are 1 (point at one), cities 2 (point at the newly added city). Thus, this player already has 4 points! (Count it out.) 1, 2, 3, 4.

You can see each land hex is assigned a number (point out the chits: 10 on woods, 8 on wheat, offering a few examples). The land is what gets players their resources—(pick up a hand of card, naming them) brick, wood, sheep (pointing to each). You see, the first thing a player does on his turn is roll the dice (roll a couple times, pointing to the matching chit). Everyone who has a village or city on the corner (point to them) of a hex whose number is rolled gets the resource it produces (show the correlation between land and card and make some appropriate resource distributions for a couple sample rolls).

The active player may spend his resources to build things. A road takes a brick and a lumber (point to this on the player aid and on the board, then spend those cards and add a road). A village, that, plus a wheat and a wool (on the player aid and on the board). A city upgrade 3 ore and 2 wheat (again, on the player aid and on the board). The trouble is he’s often not going to have everything he needs to build what he wants. He’ll have to trade resources with other players. “I’ll give someone 2 wheat for a wood,” for example (swap these cards between hands).

When someone builds to 10 points he wins.

In accordance with Rule #1, it connects

• the means (gaining, trading, and spending resources to expand and upgrade a settlement) and
• the ends (the points earned by developing the settlement).

Glaring omissions

• That points can be earned from the largest army, longest road, and certain victory point development cards.
• That there’s a nasty robber stealing and hindering production.
• That there are rules for road building and village placement.
• That players will be ruthlessly vying for position and cutting off one another.
• That players decide where to place their starting villages before the game starts.
• That hands are kept secret.
• That there are ports players can claim to aid their trades.

Commentary

Setting up the starting villages (enhance) jumpstarts the explanation by skipping past (simplify) a slew of rules surrounding placement and the choice of starting spots. These details are not important to an understanding. The omission serves the players since they might be distracted into thinking about tactics.

For the same reason the omission of development cards is intentional (simplify). It raises a lot of related concerns which are, frankly, not important to an understanding.

Include a brick and wood in one starting hand so that a road can be built (enhance). While a player won’t have enough cards to build the city in the demo, the audience can be made to understand getting these resources may have taken time. i.e. “Some turns later when he has…” Remember, the 2-minute timer is ticking. Use imagery in some instances versues always executing the full action. The goal of the overview is to situate the listener with a reasonably-solid, mostly-cursory understanding of the game. More than accuracy, he needs a sense of what drives him toward the win.

In the early bit of the overview, it talks about building and upgrading but does not actually show the cost being paid or where the resource came from. It appears to break the rule of ordering and it does, in favor of simplifying, since cost is altogether ignored.

“When someone builds to 10 points he wins,” is a half truth. The word “build” suggests building is the means to scoring. It neglects the other means and that’s a good thing. Simplifying deliberately sheds detail. It’s better to state things in an absolute, but wrong sense, than to tack asterisks on like “that’s not entirely true, but I’ll get to that later.” The astute reader may ask, “why not just say ‘when someone gets 10 points he wins’ and eliminate the conundrum?” That could’ve worked, but there was an opportunity here. From what had been taught so far, building is the way to points. An explanation should build upon itself as the picture of truth, not the reality one knows. Don’t mince words. Stay true to the explanation.

Don’t take theses rules as law.

Explanation’s more art than science. The rules are there to inform one’s thinking, not box one in. This overview was hatched in moments, with no serious forethought, in the same manner it’d have been had an audience been sitting round waiting to play. And, frankly, the next telling might be quite different from this one.