Here's a quick note about some upcoming website adjustments for the CMG Blog Triad that will manifest in March. I've often felt that having some types of cartography on Terrain Tuesday on MFWARS.com was shoehorning. While I feel battlemats, battlemaps, and the like work well for this category, because they are essentially two-dimensional terrain, larger scale maps and cartography are going to move starting in March to the Grymvald.com corner of the CMG Blog Triad appearing on what will be dubbed as Mapping Monday. They fit better with the setting-oriented blogging for Grymvald.com. This will replace the old Monday blog on Grymvald.com known as RPG Media Monday which will in turn move to the CreativeMountainGames.com Monday blog slot. That will replace Media News Monday, since I have often felt that news there was not very timely. What I had posted there either had been widespread news by the time it was posted or would work well enough under the heading of RPG Media Monday. I hope these adjustments don't throw anyone for a loop. I feel they will work better going forward.
Thanks! - Mark CMGMeanwhile, over on dakkadakka.com, have a look at the cavern created by superscenic here.
In Catan (formerly The Settlers of Catan), players try to be the dominant force on the island of Catan by building settlements, cities, and roads. On each turn dice are rolled to determine what resources the island produces. Players collect these resources (cards)—wood, grain, brick, sheep, or stone—to build up their civilizations to get to 10 victory points and win the game.
Setup includes randomly placing large hexagonal tiles (each showing a resource or the desert) in a honeycomb shape and surrounding them with water tiles, some of which contain ports of exchange. Number disks, which will correspond to die rolls (two 6-sided dice are used), are placed on each resource tile. Each player is given two settlements (think: houses) and roads (sticks) which are, in turn, placed on intersections and borders of the resource tiles. Players collect a hand of resource cards based on which hex tiles their last-placed house is adjacent to. A robber pawn is placed on the desert tile.
A turn consists of possibly playing a development card, rolling the dice, everyone (perhaps) collecting resource cards based on the roll and position of houses (or upgraded cities—think: hotels) unless a 7 is rolled, turning in resource cards (if possible and desired) for improvements, trading cards at a port, and trading resource cards with other players. If a 7 is rolled, the active player moves the robber to a new hex tile and steals resource cards from other players who have built structures adjacent to that tile.
Points are accumulated by building settlements and cities, having the longest road and the largest army (from some of the development cards), and gathering certain development cards that simply award victory points. When a player has gathered 10 points (some of which may be held in secret), he announces his total and claims the win.
Just last week, the offspring of the authors of Chainmail (1971) got together at Lake Geneva Games to play the classic Battle for the Brow...
