Settlers of Catan rule variations

I do not know if you tried this, but there is one variation on 5-6 player Settlers games in which there is a “Special Building Phase”. The “Special Building Phase” happens before each players turn. Any player that has exactly correct resource cards to build a road, settlement, city, dev card/ progress card, etc. can do so. But remember there is NO TRADING for any players (not with players, bank, or ports) during the “Special Building Phase”, the resources must be exact, i.e.: if you want to build a road, you must have a clay and a wood to do so during the “Special Building Phase”. Although it has that restriction it does allow for games to move much more rapidly. But one must note…Cities and Knights is a much more complex game than Settlers, thus games may last a little longer.

One other way you could speed up a game of Cities and Knights is to make all ports 2:1 ports and allow TRADING of any cards at each port. In other words instead of having to trade specifically 2 sheep for 1 of any resource, each port would allow players to trade 2 of any one resource for 1 of any other resource. (All 3:1 ports would also become 2:1 ports of the type just mentioned.) I believe this would speed up the game. However, this kind of speed ports may distort the game to a point that may be undesired.

I’ve played 5-6 player C&K probably a dozen times and never had it take more than 3 hours. How long is each player’s turn taking? Maybe you should get a chess clock that runs if the player isn’t trading.

I’ll second Scot’s suggestion - get a timer.

We play 5&6 player CK and it never goes longer than 3 hours (and we have a ’slow’ player).

There’s no trading in the ’special building phase’ either. We normally have it that the next person’s turn basically says ‘want to build? want to build?’ etc and we go through that phase in under a minute if no-one wants to build.

We also always play the optional rule (for beginners…), where the first two turns you re-roll 7s and the barbarians don’t move. This helps everyone actually get into a decent starting position before the ‘real’ game begins.

That really sounds like it’s taking too long.

I remember reading an interview with the creator of Settlers of Catan a while back, and someone asked him the same basic thing, why did it take so long. His reply as far as I remember was that they often played it while in a bar or pub type environment, and if someone took too long making decisions, they would chant “move or we’ll hit you”. if they took to long, they would indeed hit the person. I guess that counts as timed turns, but the story stuck in my mind.

Full contact Settlers of Catan! I like it.

Maybe have a bonus round before the game with a little RLPK to weed out some of the participants? Medical care provided by the host, of course.

Haha, contact Settlers would be awesome. I don’t think my grandmother would for it though

Instead of the special building phase when playing a 5-6 player game, we play that you loose half your cards at nine instead of seven. I also play without sevens the first two times around.

When placing your second settlement start with a city instead of a settlement. This can really jumpstart a game and makes it go faster without changing any other rules.

I’ve played some slow games recently and have one player that complains constantly about how slow the game goes yet he continues to try to push people into trades after everyone has told him they aren’t going to trade. We point out to him that he is the reason the game is slow yet he still complains.

We play that you can build or trade any time. With six players we run two groups of three simultaniously. With lots of cities, make a list of what you collect for each dice roll.