Looking for a great board game? Ask a German!

If you're looking to rediscover the awesomeness that is the (not-so-basic) board game, it's recently become clear to me (and is apparently clear to many other board game aficionadoes) that all you need to do is locate your friendly neighborhood German and ask them what they play back home. In the past couple of months I was introduced by two close friends of mine--who happen to be German--to two fantastic board games that exceed your wildest dreams of what constitutes "fun" in a board game setting: Bohnanza, and the Settlers of Catan, the latter of which was recently called the perfect board game.

Both games are remarkable for two reasons. First, they both engage all players during everyone's turn, rather than forcing players to roll, move their piece, have something happen, and then idle painfully for 20 minutes while others make their moves. Second, their entertainment is derived primarily from the tenets of politics and game theory: namely, that you not only do you care greatly about what your fellow players are doing, but winning or losing the game is strongly dependent on your capacity and/or willingnesss to cooperate with each other. Each game is built upon the need to acqure and use resources to earn the points needed for victory; however different resources have different values and gain additional value when used in combination, and the ways in which such resources are distributed among players, particularly early on, is strongly based on luck--in a manner not at all unlike how real life operates. However, how you use what you've been given is really what ultimately decides your fate.

In Bohnanza, each player has a bean "farm" on which he/she can plant a couple of several different types of beans, which are represented by cards; the more cards you lay down, the more you are planting, and if you reach a given threshold number of cards you can sell the harvest for gold coins (whoever has the most in the end wins). However, some beans are scarcer than others (i.e. fewer cards in the deck), and thus require fewer cards to achieve the same number of gold coins. For example, one type of bean may have 24 cards in circulation, and thus requres 4 cards planted to equal 1 gold coin, 7 cards for 2 gold coins etc., while another type of bean may only have 4 cards available, and so planting just 2 may get you 2 gold coins. Of course, the glory is in the ability for players to trade with one another, to screw each other over, or to build the ultimate socialist utopia, as my two friends and I have done in the first game I had ever played, where we all took a highly cooperative approach and magically and unknowningly finished the game in a 19-19-19 tie.

Meanwhile, Settlers of Catan tells the story of settlers (you) arriving on a far-away island where each player seeks to build the largest settlement using the resources of lumber, grain, ore, clay, and wool; however, the board is broken up into an array of hexagons, each of which contain only one of these resources. Moreover, each hexagon is also given a number value from 2-12, corresponding to a possible sum of the numbers obtained by rolling two dice--noting that the extreme values are less probable. The resource in a given location is only fruitful if you have a settlement built next to it and its number is rolled. Once you select a starting location (an important first task, as the hexgaons are randomly placed for each game and thus can result in awkward clumping of resources), everyone competes for resources, again with the capacity to trade with one another, in addition to trading via ports on the coast. Settlers has several other features that lend the game even greater depth, but I will refrain from exploring them here and leave it to others to discover on their own. As the elaborate nature of the game's inner workings emerge, you really become amazed to think that you ever played something as tedious and unfulfilling as monopoly.

Ah, and not to mention that Settlers has expansion packs, of which I have yet to try but will no doubt very soon. In some sense, Bohnanza represents the bare bones of what makes board games with other humans fun--namely, meaningful human interaction--while Settlers takes this framework as the basis for something surprisingly rich and yet still very simple and easy to learn. I'm not saying that I'd give up my Stratego in a heartbeat, but certainly it's sad to think that I didn't have access when I was little to the games the German kids have. Luckily, it's never too late to start.