At a meeting of our store managers, we discovered that all 7 of us had purchased a copy of Settlers of Catan for his personal collection. I'm not aware of any other game to hold this distinction. The games came to us a few years ago from Germany bearing the German Game of the Year award. It has since been recognized by Games Magazine.

Each player guides a group of settlers toward prosperity on the rich but undeveloped island of Catan. The game begins with laying out the 37 hexagonal pieces of the board. This produces a different game board each time the game is played. By cleverly building and trading resources, each tries to dominate the island. Building roads, settlements and cities (represented by little wood counters) depends upon the resources you collect. What resources you collect depends upon where you have chosen to build and upon the roll of the dice. This combination of strategy and luck is extremely addictive.

A very fun and surprisingly addictive game. Recently, a few of us were waiting for some other players to show up for the game we had planned that night and we said, "Lets play a game of Settlers while we wait!" That game turned into 2 games before they showed up. We were all very happy that they took so long. ;-)

The game comes with four sets of wood counters and can be upgraded to 5 or 6 players with the expansion set. This set, of course, consists of 2 more sets of wood pieces, so the price is a little higher than most expansion sets. . . but oh, so worth it!