Catan developer Q&A

Last Wednesday marked the Xbox Live Arcade release of Catan and in case you’re burnt out from playing all week then Xboxic’s got some nice reading material for you. The friendly folks at the Xbox Community Network held a Q&A session with Big Huge Games developer Brian Reynolds. Brian was nice enough to give some pretty extensive and in-depth answers so be sure to check it out if you’re interested in Catan. Or just bored. Or like to waste your bandwith. We really don’t care much either way, as long as we get lots of traffic.

XCN: For those of us who haven’t played the Catan board game before, could you give us an introduction to it and why it is so successful?

BR: The island of Catan consists of 19 colorful land tiles, representing mountains, pastures, forests, and other regions. Players colonize the island, founding settlements in places they think will be productive, and each time the dice are rolled some of the settlements produce resources. The most exciting part of the game begins when the players wheel and deal to trade the resources with each other to get the ones they need, and then build new roads and cities to settle the land. The winner is the player most successful at planning, trading, and expanding!

XCN: We hear that you’re a pretty serious player of the board game. What are your favourite memories of playing it, and are you confident that the Xbox Live Arcade game will let others have similar experiences?

BR: Yes I love the board game and have played it at the tournament level here in my home state of Maryland. The game where I won my first place trophy, I managed to build my final city using a crazy set of 15 resource cards, none of which were the normally-called-for wheat and ore, traded at my three-for-one port – it was one of the biggest hands of cards I’d ever held, I was very lucky not to roll the robber, and it worked out perfectly to win the game and the tournament.

Catan Live is going to be great both for players who already love Catan and for players who’ve never seen it before. One of the huge advantages it offers is the chance to find new opponents from around the Xbox Live community, and then to play with them using the great graphics and sound of the Xbox 360 platform. We’ve also streamlined the interface so that gameplay is quite fast and intuitive. With the Xbox handling all the rules and recordkeeping, you can easily finish games of Catan in 30 minutes, much less than the 90 minutes normally needed to play the board game. That means you’ll be able to play many more games and have even more fun!