Having a baby is a good time to unplug and get away from the internet. There is no much cool stuff out there, and making more has never been easier. Have you seen Odeo? Oh, man! Tuhin Mehta’s Gizmodo’s Hard Drive Dying Dance Track (as heard on Rocketboom 2/17/06) is awesome.
In my time away, I’ve been mostly playing with my son, working and listening to the cooing (and screaming) of my new daughter. Whenever anyone is out our house, though, we have been forcing them to play Settlers of Catan. This addictive board game is tons of fun and we even got the Expansion Set and the Seafarers add-on for Christmas. However, when I looked online for related stuff for this post, I found that everyone interested enough to write about it online has all four billion extensions and has played to death. My idea seem small in comparison, but here goes.
(If you haven’t even played the game yet, none of the following will make sense to you).
Krakatoa
This is really just a rearranging of the Expansion Set, but it has a unique feature (and a back-story!). Jessica has been on a quest to find all the cool children’s books so she’ll be prepared at used-book stores. I remembered a great book I read call The 21 Balloons about some explorers who go to Krakatoa right before it explodes. There is a diamond mine in the volcano and after the explosion, the island turns into a beautiful ring-shaped atoll (at least in my memory of the book). Now you have the chance to settle this land and even search for diamonds!
Take all the land cards from Settlers and the Expansion set and pull out one wheat field. Add on water tile and shuffle. Make a row of four and then a row of five on top of it. Following the map, make another row of six, but replace the middle two tiles with water hexes. Now make a row of seven, only for the middle three put a water, the grain card upside-down (or a gold hex if you have Seafarers) and another water. Now just complete the mirror image of water you’ve done before. Place the dice-number-tokens in a spiral, starting from the outside. You should place the last, ‘ZC’, on the “diamond mine” in the center.
The extra rules for this game are simple. To get to the diamonds in the middle, you need to build a bridge which costs two brick and two wood. (Just use a road tile to represent this.) You can build only one settlement/city on the diamond island and no roads. Settlements on the island don’t have to be two clicks away from settlements on the otherside or each other. You get an extra victory point for any settlement or city you build on the island. If you have a colony on the island and its ‘6′ is rolled, you can choose whatever resource you want to collect (or any two if you have a city).
We’ve tried this game and it was quite fun. The one water tile amongst the land hexes can make for some tight squeezes (Atolls are almost never perfectly circular.) Let me know if this game works for you!
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