First Nations of Catan: Playthrough of a decolonised Catan
I don't know how I came across it, but I found this "decolonised" version of Settlers of Catan. ... Decolonised? Well, now that you come to mention it, I hadn't really noticed that Settlers is all based on this mythical idea of a "land without a people", a "virgin territory" which in most historical cases wasn't actually empty.
Catan is a fictional hexagonal land, of course, and there aren't any aspects of the game that strongly hint at America, India, Haiti or any other specific historical colonisations. But once you see it, it's a bit hard to un-see it. So I've been keen to get a chance to play "First Nations of Catan" for a while, just to see if it plays well. Finally we had a go at it! So here's my report back.
BY THE WAY: let me acknowledge that -- as someone pointed out -- it's a bit suboptimal for me, a white Brit, to be playing a white American's game mod, in the name of decolonisation. There are other people who are much better placed than me to do the decolonising. But, well, we try to be allies and self-critical where we can, and if others can tell us more about what's good/bad from their perspective, I'll try to keep my ears open.
Before you read any more of this, I recommend having a look at the original blog about the modified game "First Nations of Catan" to see how it works. They tried to keep it similar to the original, and using the same pieces, but with one player taking the role of an indigenous people.
First thing to say: I liked the game! It immediately gives a very different feel from the pure Catan game because of the asymmetry: there's one player whose moves and whose capacities are different to the others, and so as a Settler player you have to manage your own balance of interests, between the two very different sub-strategies of competing against the other Settlers and competing against the First Nations player.
In our game, one of the Settlers won. The game was very balanced, I think, though the First Nations player reported that they were holding back a bit on their "attacks" rather than going all-out. But, as in a good game of ordinary Settlers, by the end most players were on the verge of 10 points and it wasn't clear who was going to be the winner.
There's a dymanic to this new game which I hadn't realised, but is obvious in retrospect: the First Nations player started off with quite a lot of power to shape the game, and it felt very strongly weighted in their favour --- but then as the game progressed the other players build up their settlements and got more of their own capacity to generate resources, the influence of First Nations player weakened. We've only played it once so I shouldn't make a claim about whether it's balanced, but to me it seemed like it was. It'll be interesting to play more, and to play more "for the win", to see what happens.