Thanks to pantone from Ars for posting this.

Settlers of Catan will launch on Xbox Live Wednesday, May 2. The game will sell for 800 points, or $10USD.

As mentioned in my previous posts about Settlers coming to the 360, I am most curious about how the AI will work, especially in isolation from each other. Playing against three bots in jSettlers is much more difficult than playing against one plus two human players. The jSettlers AI is written to keep human players from winning; for the AI to win is an ancillary objective.

Nice timing, roclar.

Gaming site Joystiq.com has an interview with Brian Reynolds, CEO and director of Big Huge Games, who is making the Xbox 360 version of Settlers of Catan. In case you don’t want to read the interview, here are some important points for those of us who have loved this table top classic game for years:

• Klaus Teuber had direct input on the project, especially in the areas of the computer AI. Apparently he showed up with an Excel spreadsheet full of strategies and tactics, which were leveraged by Big Huge Games during the development process.
• There is a sixty-second time limit to complete your entire turn during ranked play. There is a ninety-second time limit during unranked play. You can set the limit to whatever you choose in a “custom” rule set game.
• Reynolds is a big fan of SoC, taking first place at a Maryland tournament. It’s nice to see that the person in charge of the project loves the game so much, but I’m surprised that he didn’t mention jSettlers. He also stated that all of the Settlers games are for the “PC.” It’s unclear if he means not for gaming consoles, or personal computers, wherein “PC” is often synonymous with “Windows OS machines.” The reason that’s important is that JSOC and the other online Settlers games are not Windows-only, and such an oversight tells me they didn’t trouble to Google “online settlers of catan” even once. However, I could be wrong, and Reynolds just means that Settlers has never been on a console before.
• You will be able to see how the dice have rolled for your current game. This is motherfucking awesome. No longer will a player (usually me) bitch that 6es are less common than 12s during any given game.
• There will be voice chat (a common Xbox 360 Live! feature), as well as sixteen emotes called “ticklers,” which help communicate why you’re refusing a trade, or your frustration with a die roll — in which case, a hammer smashes the dice to bits.
• The AI characters will have different strategies from one another. One might favor expansion, while the other concentrates on road building/longest road, etc.
• The game is due out in mid-to-late-March.

Read the rest of this entry »

After a little delay, the entries for the second JSOC tournament are closed! It’s just us regulars who signed up, so it should be easy to conduct the games.

Good luck, everyone!

First zombies, now Euro-style board games. The Xbox 360 moves one step closer towards my household. According to this post at 1up.com, Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne will be offered on Microsoft’s Xbox Live Internet service. Other, as-yet-unnamed European games will be making their way onto Microsoft’s console gaming platform. There is no word on about the pricing structure of games, or when they will be available for download. 1up seems to think by the year’s end.

Settlers of Catan is one of my favorite games. I play it online almost every day and I play the tabletop version with friends whenever I can. One of the problems with the game is that it doesn’t travel very well. There are lots of pieces and Settlers requires a large playing surface. I purchased the travel edition before my last trip out to California on business.

When is a travel game not a travel game? When the playing surface is a square, single block of plastic. While the board is much smaller than the surface area necessary for the original game, it isn’t easy to pack. When taken out of its normal cardboard box and put into freezer bags, the original game packs almost as lightly as the travel version. The board should have folded in half, with the playing pieces hiding inside. It’s such a standard setup for travel games I was shocked by Settler’s solid board design. I wound up taking the original game with me to California and left the travel edition at home.

One of the biggest differences between the travel edition and other versions is that the hex numbers are fixed. The desert is always in the middle of the board. There are too many holes in the board, which allows tired/new players to put settlements and cities in illegal positions. As you can tell by the photo, the board allows players to illegally place settlements on the straight sides of each hex, instead of at the legal corners of each hex.

The Settlers of Catan travel edition is good for playing on uneven surfaces, or where space is at an absolute premium. A camping trip is a good example. The cards and pieces are very small, and in most cases you are better off shoving the original in freezer bags and playing with the full-sized set.

The travel edition can be purchased for $19.99 + shipping from the fine folks at FunAgain Games or local game stores.

Short story: too many design flaws to make this a worthwhile purchase.

Two and a half out of five STFU mugs

Thanks to some fucktard who decided that “all muslims must die” was a good game name, we’ve had to put a username:password on the roclar.net JSOC server.

If you’re interested in playing, please email me and I’ll relay the pertinent info to you.

Registration is live again! Please register now!

Register now!

Okay, we’re cranking up the Java Settlers of Catan II Tournament. My buddy Stilts will be hosting the event. Registration will run until August 4, 2006. There’s no cost to enter. If you are new(ish) to Settlers of Catan or JSOC, you may want to read my JSOC Settlers of Catan Guide.

Read the rest of this entry »

I know a fair amount of my Gibberish readers play the boardgame Settlers of Catan. For those of you who don’t, Settlers is a three to four player game (up to six with the expansion) and the object is to build towns on a random board made up of landscape tiles. Each tile produces a key resource needed to build roads, settlements, cities, etc.

From the Wikipedia:

The players in the game represent the eponymous Settlers, establishing a colony on the previously uninhabited Island of Catan. The island itself is laid out randomly at the beginning of each game from hexagonal tiles (”hexes”) representing five types of resources: ore, grain, wool, lumber and brick.

As players establish towns and cities on the island, each settlement receives resources for its adjacent hexes. The resources, represented by resource cards, can be used to build more roads, towns, cities, or to obtain chance cards that can be used at any time. Various achievements, such as building a town or establishing the longest road, grant each player one or more victory points. The winner is the first player to accumulate ten victory points.

Players are allowed to trade among each other the resources they have produced, and to trade “off the island” for a hefty price. It is difficult for any one player to produce all the resources necessary for progress, so astute trading is the strategic heart of the game. Player interaction is further complicated by the presence of a robber, which is used to steal from other players and hinder their production of resources. There is no combat. Apart from moving the robber, refusing to trade, and cutting off building routes, there is no way to harm other players.

It’s a great game, but one of the major drawbacks is that you have to have at least three people together in order to play. That is, until we discovered Jsettlers, a free, Java-based Settlers of Catan game originally written as an artificial intelligence project. Stilts runs his own server, and I’ve written a quick acclimation guide to ease the transition into Jsettlers for those familiar only with the boardgame. Quite a few of us play JSOC together, and as is typical with my a-type personality readers, we got to talking about another tournament.

The first tourney had limited success, I think in part to the difficulty of coordinating schedules between players.

Anyway, let’s try this again. It has been suggested that we all chip in $5 for an entry fee, with the cash going to the winner/top x. Or perhaps a non-cash prize of some kind. Who’s in for a JSOC tournament?

Hey everyone, just a reminder that the JSOC Tournament is closed for entries and will begin tomorrow and last until October 8th. Big ups to Stilts for hosting the event.

Good luck everyone, and have fun!

Distance, schedules, bad breath, and other factors can break up gaming groups, as I’m sure most of you have experienced first hand. As such, we were very happy to find Java Settlers of Catan. Jsettlers is open source and was originally a project on artificial intelligence.

As a project on non-artificial intelligence, we’d like to host a somewhat open JSOC tournament.

My good friend Stilts will host the tournament on his Jsettlers server. We recommend the Sun Java 1.4.2 JRE.

Participation is free, the winner will get bragging rights and probably some hate mail.

Here are the tournament rules/details, as well as some quirks in the JSOC game play you should be aware of:

Tournament rules

• The tournament will start on September 24th, 2005 and will end on October 8th, 2005. If all players have finished their 8 games, then the tournament may end early.
• Each contestant must finish at least 5 games in order to qualify for scoring. You can finish no more than 8 games.
• The tournament will be won by whomever has the highest number of victory points at the end of the regulation period.
• You can receive no more than 11 victory points per game, except in the case of an all-human game, wherein you can receive a maximum of 12 points.
• At least two human players must start and finish a game in order for it to count.
• You will earn one additional victory point if your game consists of four human players (no robot players at any time).

JSOC quirks

• You can trade and build in any order and in any combination. Meaning, you can trade, build, trade, build, etc. during the same turn.
• The robber may be returned to the desert. Although we normally make chicken sounds if you do so.
• You may initiate trade with whomever holds the dice unsolicited. If it is player A’s turn, you may offer player A a trade.

Tournament mechanics

• Please sign up at the tournament registration page.
• Sign ups will close on September 21st.
• You may play valid (at least 2 human) tournament games at any time. However, we would like to propose that people be available for 8PM - 11PM EST (5PM - 8PM PST) for tournament games. Meaning, if you want to play with other people, we suggest you sign on at those hours. We’re not asking you to be online for three hours a day from 9/24 - 10/08 :)

Good luck — please email me if you have any questions!