Wheelin’ and Dealin’

Everyone has house rules they play with when they pick up a game. It could be making people draw endlessly in Uno until they get a card they can play, or allowing certain slang terms not found in a common dictionary in Scrabble, or (a famous example) letting you collect all previously levied fines when you land on Free Parking in Monopoly. House rules can be fun, they can change up the experience and, sometimes, they even streamline certain aspects of a game to make the whole process of playing it better for the players.

Settlers of Catan is not a game that, on its face, really needs house rules. It’s a streamlined game that is pretty easy to pick up and play, even for a new player. You set up the randomly arranged board, drop the number tiles on the board, and then get players rolling so that resources are dolled out, properties can be built, and progress can be made. It’s a competitive game, not a cooperative one, but there are still community aspects to the game that can make it fun for players on any experience level.

Over time the game has had a number of expansions, some of which add more and more complicated rules, all with the goal of adding depth and variability to the game. I haven’t picked up most of those, but I did grab the Seafarers expansion primarily because it added water tiles and the ability to make islands. Along with that I grabbed the expansions both for the base game and Seafarers that expanded the game to six players. This allowed me to enjoy a fun, complex, varied version of the board (by using as many of the land and sea tiles as possible) with my family (which has far too many people in it). It’s fun.

However, once I played this version of the game enough times I found that I wanted a little more spice. The base game allows you to trade between players, swapping around resources through wheeling and dealing to try and get an advantage on your turn. “I need wool for stone” is ingrained in the minds of many players, and all you need to do is say that to someone to see if they’ve ever played Catan. Likely they have as this is a massively popular game. Still… there had to be more you could do with the concept of trading, right?

On a family trip, I devised just that. Considering my family are all avid game players we had a bunch of dice around, so I set up what I called the “stock market”. One card of each resource was set out, a die set to 1 on top, and the market was open once the game began. At the start, each resource had the price of 1 meaning that, to trade that Wool for Stone, it was a one-to-one trade. However, when you trade a resource, the values for those resources adjust. The resource you traded for goes up a point and, when possible, the value for the resource traded away goes down.

There are some caveats that come along with this. First, a resource can never have a value less than 1 (that would lead to irrational numbers and, well, the game just can’t support that). In our example above, while Wool becomes more expensive, gaining a value of 2, Stone (which was valued at 1) remains at 1 since it can’t go lower. There’s a natural floor to the stock market, and no, penny stocks are not allowed.

So in this example, you’ve traded 1 Stone for 1 Wool. Wool is now valued at 2 and, if you wanted to trade a further Stone, it would cost you 2 Stone (at a comparative value of 1 to Wool’s 2 it costs 2 Stone for 1 Wool). This would then increase the price of Wool again, to 3, while Stone stays at 1. Trades could continue like this, with someone trading 1 Wool to get 3 Clay, and so on, with the market adjusting around each trade as items were bought and sold. It becomes a game of trading and strategic use of the market.

Of course (and this is the second caveat) this is a system that could get abused, and the most obvious way is via trades back and forth. Say you have Stone and Wool both valued at 2. If you trade 2 Stone for 2 Wool, Wool goes up to 3, Stone goes down to 1, and then you can trade in 1 of those Wool to get 3 Stone, equalizing the two back out but getting a 2 Stone profit out of nowhere. Assuming you had the Wool to do this over and over, you could easily crank up a ton of Stone to then use buying other resources and simply garnering new buildings, over and over, every turn.

That’s part of the reason why we had to put in a rule limiting back and forth transactions. Sometimes when my family plays with the stock market we state that players can only trade back and forth three times. Other times we put in hard regulations (“uh oh, the SEC is watching”) and say there can’t be any back-and-forth trades; if you trade in one resource you can’t trade back to it that turn. That puts a hard cap on the markets and limits its usefulness… although there are times where the ridiculous market trades become fun all on their own so I don’t always like to limit them.

And, of course, once you introduce the market it does limit the effectiveness of the standard player trades. They are still possible but why would you bother negotiating when you can play the markets to get what you want? I know I rely heavily on the market over other ways of gaining resources because it’s a powerful tool that works well with my brain. I can see the ways the numbers can be manipulated and it gives me so many resources.

It’s probably a good thing I never had any interest in Wall Street. I would have ended up a case study in insider trading.

The stock market is a specific kind of way to play the game and I fully realize it’s not for everyone. But for players that want a different way to game the system and have fun living out their real estate mogul selves in Settlers of Catan, the market is great fun.