Finally switched from house rules to actual game rules for Catan

Played with my group for 2 years using our own trading rules where you could trade any resource for any other at 1:1. Last week we tried the official 4:1 ratio and suddenly resource management actually mattered. Has anyone else found that the real rules make a game way better than the house rules you thought were improvements?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_claire8d agoMost Upvoted

My group did the exact same thing with 1:1 trading for a year and we thought we were geniuses. Turns out we were just playing a different game where nobody ever had to think about what to build. The 4:1 rule made one guy flip the table when he couldn't trade his 15 sheep for stone, best game night ever.

dakota4157d ago

Ugh man that 15 sheep thing hits home, my friend Steve stockpiled wheat like he was preparing for the apocalypse and then got mad when nobody wanted to trade because we all had wheat too. It really does change the whole game when you can't just beg your way out of bad dice rolls. I still laugh thinking about him trying to trade 12 brick for a single wood and getting dead silence from the whole table. Did your group ever try the harbor master variant after that or did you just stick with the regular ports?

dakotab938d ago

Haha YES, flipping the table energy is EXACTLY what this game needed. My group did the same thing with infinite trading and we were all building cities by turn 3, it was ridiculous. The moment we switched to 4:1 my buddy tried to trade his 15 ore for one brick and just stared at me when I said no. Best part was watching him finally get that stone port and think he was a genius again, only to realize everyone else had already built their roads. That first game with real rules is just pure chaos and I love it.