Catan: Das Kartenspiel

The Good
The possibility to play it via Internet against other humans is what makes this game so nice. Because the original "hardware" card game requires that at least two humans meet each other in some location, and I don't have much time to drive through the whole town to meet someone for playing cards, I like the opportunity to play a "virtual" game. You still need the time, ok, since a game can last for hours, but I can live with that. At least I can play at all. And a nice side effect: I don't need to memorize the many different rules - the game knows all cards by heart :)

The graphics are totally mediocre. You can't call them bad, but they are far beyond good either. The sound is ok, since there isn't any sound besides the two or three different effects.

The Bad
Well, the single player mode is not really neccessary. You can't use your self-built decks against the CPU, so you can't even test them before using them against a human player. The CPU is dumb, too. I won my first and second game without having played the original card game before at all - with a standard deck! With my tourney deck, the CPU would be beaten within 20 minutes, I suppose.

Another bad thing is the slow gameplay. Online and offline play suffers by evil slowdowns - you always begin to think that the game has crashed/disconnected and all the time was wasted.

And that's the worst thing: the Internet play! I said above that I like the game because it is playable via Internet - and I still say so. But the problem arises in a unstable network code which likes to drop the connection when you are at your best move. The game server is crazy, too, since he loves to break down on saturday evening, when no technician is around :( I had good games without any disconnect or trouble, but I had days where 3 of 4 games were interrupted.

The Bottom Line
If they would fix internet play and speed the game up a bit, it would be a really great game for every Siedler von Catan lover - and it still is for the (offlline) beginner, who can't play Siedler at all and wants to learn and get some practice. It's cheap, too. But with all this Internet trouble... well, they will be a patch someday.