Have you ever played Diplomacy? It makes Catan look like a picnic.

https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2017/11/diplomacy-the-most-evi...

Can confirm that a game of Diplomacy will take a group of happy friends and turn them into scheming backstabbers who will never trust one another ever again for the rest of their lives.

The solution is to only play Diplomacy with a group where everyone is a known scheming backstabber who will never trust one another ever again for the rest of their lives! Have tried, can confirm it works. Good times.

Some people can deal with that. I played Diplomacy with my whole group at work and everything is fine.

I wonder if that is a learned skill or a personality trait? In the former case, it might be valuable to teach it.

His response seems like hyperbole to me.

It's great, but if your group is used to something like Catan, it's much more time consuming. Great at ending friendships, however.

If you want to play in one sitting, in-person you need 6 or 7 players for a good 6+ hours...So basically it's a game for college students (I played it a lot at uni).

As an adult you can try to online versions where you only do one move per x(usually 24) hours. The games last weeks but you can play remotely at your leisure.

I am probably the only one playing Britain in the history of the game who never made it off the damn island. The game is really hard.

Even with board full of experienced players, every nation can have a bad start every once in a while. Sometimes people do gang up on you at the start.

However, if you play lots of games, and never get off the British Isles, you might want to look for a different hobby.

The game is meant to be hard: after all at most one in seven people can win. (Unless you are a drawmonger and consider that an acceptable outcome.)

I actually lost friends playing Diplomacy! Stabbing little bitches!

All stabs are preemptive.

I played Catan about 1000 times in 1997, and it did nothing to hurt my friendships. If your friendship can't survive this game, I wonder if there's any game it can survive. Well, there are friendlier games, but Catan is fairly middle of the road in how much you can screw someone over.

The only true dick move in the game is to trade away all of a certain good in lucrative trades, and then take it all back with a monopoly card. Most people have enough decency not to do that. Then again, at my house, we play it in a fairly friendly way and don't try to cripple each other unless we have to.

Seriously though, Euro board games are how I made friends in grad school, and how I spend a lot of my time with friends and family.

I regularly introduce new games to my extended family. They particularly enjoy Carcassonne and Cards Against Humanity although both engender certain playstyles; the uncle who dominates monopoly and risk loves to throw out a 4-sided connector against whoever is winning in Carcassonne. One aunt can't help but go for certain jokes regardless of whether they're the "best" jokes or not.

The one time we tried Catan I gave up not because the adults couldn't hack it but because my teenage cousins insisted on being involved but couldn't sit still long enough to set up the board and make it through a turn.

So for me the cultural conflict isn't about European vs American values reflected in game play as much as some people who need constant stimulation and have no patience. Considering the ubiquity of phones, ipads and the internet I'm not sure that ADD-like inability to focus is uniquely American. I think these games can also help teach kinds to slow down, decompress and pay attention if given a enough time but at least in my case I see these guys once a year at Thanksgiving which is not enough.

But glomming onto something mentioned in the article Mah Jong is popular with us because who wins isn't obvious until the game ends and who has the highest score may not be the person who declares Mah Jong. That makes the game more fun because everyone's involved to the end and it adds a layer of strategy as you're not just trying to up your score but block score-increasing moves by others.

Catan is still friendlier than many of its counterparts. In terms of the old marquee games, Catan is really most similar to Monopoly: buy property, barter with the other players, collect matched sets of things, and hope the dice make your property investments pay out. Obviously the topology of the game is completely different, but compared to the bloodthirsty game of Monopoly, Catan is quite congenial - youre not out to bankrupt the other players, just amass more VP than them.

Catan has significantly more adversarial aspects than Monopoly; Cutting off roads that players need, controlling the placement of the robber, choosing who to steal from, denial of trade of resources. I think one of the things that makes Catan so rage-inciting, is that it's quite common to take actions to deny the other players points, even if it has a negative effect on your overall position.

Also, the random nature of the robber, and the kingmaker moves where a sore loser will decide which other player will win.

Dealing with both of those things is part of the game... But I prefer games with less emphasis on those aspects.

They are part of the game to keep it somewhat interesting for those who were unlucky in the early buildup. How would a game designed to minimize kingmaking not end up being an isolated race to the high-score?

Maybe you would not mind these forms of interaction so much in a game that is more upfront about them? On the surface, Catan seems to be almost cooperative, I could imagine the "politics" to catch some players by surprise, over and over again. Something with a darker theme might help to put some distance between personal relationships and gametable betrayals.

Junta for example, my all time favorite despite some really crude game mechanics is all about bought loyalties and backstabbing (or maybe I like it because of the crude mechanics, there is even an annoying Risk minigame that occasionally pops up to completely change the pace) Informal alliances sometimes rise and fall apart before the even first turn is over.

There's games that have less kingmaker impact - where your choices restrict the choices other players can make, but not to the extent that Settlers does. Consider just about any worker placement games where, say, five players compete for three three worker spots on a particular resource tile.

It sucks if you were one of the two players who didn't get a chance to place - but it doesn't feel quite as shitty as when someone occupies the only worker spot for a particular tile, just to spite you.

It's one of the most boring game out there. The losers and the potential winners are decided after a couple of turns. Then you're just powerless and waiting for the game to finish.

That's not really true, because dice luck is so important in Catan. You can have the best position in the world but if no one rolls your numbers there's nothing you can do to win.

Of course, this is still boring for a completely different reason.

Risk is the best for arguments. When the writing is on the wall amass your forces and take another friend down with you.

Heck, I've played a few games of Catan where it's tested marriages.

Bet the damn robber was the crux of it.

We play a variant without the robber where a 7 means you just draw a resource of your choice. Much preferred if you aren't looking for a competitively enhanced game. :-)

We have a house rule that we re-roll 7s in the first two rounds. This after a 6 player game where the first round saw most people rolling a 7. It didn't particularly screw anyone, but it's just not a fun way to start the game.

Even with that rule, we usually only use the robber to hurt the leader. During the early game when nobody is clearly ahead, we prefer to place it on poor production fields, and use it just to steal a card.

This is not just fuzzy feel-good pacifism, it's good sense, because an enemy is not an asset, and it's harmful to make yourself a target. Hurt people who deserve it, but otherwise just go for the card.

Actually hurting someone with the robber at the beginning doesn't make sense even economically - most of the time you need to be able to trade with them.

My father once caused a game-long shortage of bricks and nobody - including him - was able to do anything. Lol. :-)