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Catan: The First Island brings tabletop gaming glee to iPhone

Filed under: Gaming, Features, iPhone, iPod touch, App Review

Catan. If you’ve ever visited, there’s a good chance you’re passionate about it.

First unveiled as a traditional board game in 1995, the now-classic trading and settlement game has evolved over the years to include dozens of scenarios, expansions and reworkings, from limited edition game maps to browser-based Internet versions. Naturally, the Settlers of Catan is now also available for the iPhone [iTunes link], and it’s a a damn good condensed version.

First things first. This is the full, but basic, game. The original ruleset isn’t condensed at all, but none of the expansions are present in the current version. While long-time board gamers might scoff at simple “vanilla Settlers,” the basic game as presented in Exozet’s iPhone version acts just like the tabletop big brother. You can choose to play on the fixed beginner board or a random map, you can play with three or four people (or bots), you can trade, you can go for longest road, etc. All the things that make Catan such an enduring game are here, and that’s great to have in your pocket.

Read on to find out more about Catan: the First Island on the iPhone (and iPod Touch).

The Game

The Settlers of Catan is, at heart, a game of collecting resources and building a collection of settlements and cities on a modular board, with the goal of reaching a set point total (between 8 and 12, but defaulting to 10) before the other players. Players who know the rules will be able to jump right in. You can set the animations to turbo and turn off the opponent comments for the fastest possible game. If you’re quick, a full game can take around 10 minutes – about as much time as it takes some people to set up the tabletop version. Players who aren’t familiar can go through a tutorial with digital Catan’s familiar Professor Easy to learn how to build, trade and acquire points or read up on the game at Board Game Geek.

The App

The Catan gameplay doesn’t suffer on the iPod’s small screen. Each resource hex is clearly differentiated by both color and graphics, but colorblind players might have trouble figuring out which settlements and roads belong to which player since there are no player icons to be found. You’ll have to rely on memory to kept things straight,

Figuring out how the game operates is superbly straightforward. Things blink when you can can affect them, the menus are easy to figure out and so on. If you know how to play the tabletop game and aren’t totally new to the iPhone, you will probably know how to play the app in, at most, 90 seconds.

Take, for example, the trade screen. You can see the five resource types and how many you happen to be sitting on at any given moment. Flick one up towards your opponents and the number goes down. This is what you’re offering. Flick one down towards your player avatar and the number goes up. Simple and clear. Click on the big green checkmark to try and seal the deal – and notice how this icon is located at the opposite side of the screen from the decline/exit button. Very smart.

If you get fed up with AI opponents trying to trade with you, there is an option to decline all offers for the rest of the turn. When you have the resources that you want already, this greatly speeds up the game (a good thing).

This brings up a point: who is this app’s target audience? With the tutorial and the easy playing time, someone totally new to Catan could pick up the game and enjoy it. But, c’mon, the people who will be most excited about this are the hardcore players. A skilled player will be able to beat the game’s toughest bots – William and Hillary – with some regularity, but there is still enough challenge here to be worth the five spot. If you’re addicted to Catan and want ultra-easy access to a quick game (make your decisions fast and you can be done in ten minutes), this is the app for you. Hopefully, enough players will complain about the less-than-brilliant AI and we’ll get another update to make them play better.

While it would be feasible to implement in the tabletop version, one new feature in the app is the “resource bonus.” This setting allows a player to never go too long without getting at least a little something. Especially early in the game, a series of bad rolls can mean you’re not building anything while your opponents erect cities all over the place. With the resource bonus option turned on, after five empty rolls, a player can simply select one resource of their choice.

A drought like this is less likely to happen if the dice option is set to Stack (or Stack5). When using Stack, the dice rolls have perfect distribution, so that if the game ends after exactly 36 rolls, you’ll have seen every possible combination of two dice during play. With Stack5, five random options are removed at the start of the game and the numbers reset after 31 rolls. There is a deck of cards that Mayfair Games sells for the tabletop Catan version that does the same thing, but the extra text on those cards is not included in the iPhone version.

Speaking of mini-additions, the First Island is ripe for mini-expansions like The Great River of Catan or The Fishermen of Catan, and I hope we’ll be seeing some of the more game-changing expansions like Seafarers or Traders & Barbarians. They’d better be working on these options. Seriously.

Looking even further down the road, should Exozet ever develop a larger version for the iPad, adding the 5-6 player expansion might also be cool, and players could play a tabletop game just by setting the iPad on the the table and going from there (dealing with cards hidden in players hands will be tricky, for sure). It’s a thought.

Final thoughts

For some reason, Exozet thinks players want to listen to in-game music instead of their iTunes library. The game’s music and sound effects can be muted, but is still doesn’t allow your own music library to play; that’s annoying, and one of the most-requested changes in customer reviews. Another downside is that there’s no way (that we could find) to offer trades with other players on their turn. This is important if you’re trying to offer 2-1 trades to stay under the 8-card robber hand limit, but because the game moves so fast it’s not that much of a problem, really.

We’d also really, really love an undo button. The app is pretty idiot-proof, but mistakes do happen.

Finally, there’s a bonus feature to this $5 app that hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves. The Settlers of Catan needs at least three players (the 2007 expansion Traders & Barbarians expansion for the tabletop game gave us a reasonable two-player ruleset, but it’s not the same game) to get going. With this app, we now have a very good way to play real two-player Catan. It’s a slight hassle to coordinate, but this app gives two people a third “player” whenever needed. Catan: The FIrst Island is the next best thing to having an extra friend around who’s always up for another trip to Catan.

TUAWCatan: The First Island brings tabletop gaming glee to iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Week in review: Crunchpad renamed JooJoo, Google adds real-time search results

Here’s our rundown of the week’s business and tech news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

Crunchpad manufacturer renames product JooJoo, promises launch this Friday at $499 — The CrunchPad was the tablet computer being built by TechCrunch with production contractor Fusion Garage. But the companies had a falling out (whose details remain murky), and now Fusion Garage is trying to sell the device on its own. The JooJoo site is accepting pre-orders, despite a lawsuit filed by TechCrunch.

Americans consume 3,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information per year, not counting work — The average American sucks down 34 gigabytes of data per day, half of that from video games, says the latest update of a study by two researchers at the University of California in San Diego.

11 things I didn’t know about app development — The “I” in question is VentureBeat writer Paul Boutin, who summarize the surprising things he learned while attending VentureBeat’s DiscoveryBeat 2009 event, where experts discussed how mobile and social applications can stand out in an age of noise.

How to fail … gloriously — This post features a video of Eric Ries (of Startup Lessons Learned) discussing how and why a company failed despite five years of work, a talented staff, and $40 million of venture capital.

Seagate finally makes move from hard drives to flash storage — After two years of study, the hard drive maker is launching a new flash memory storage business, one of its most significant expansions in years.

And here are five more stories we thought were important, thought-provoking, or fun:

Google adds real-time search to its results page — Google search results are about to speed up, with what the company says is “the first time ever any search engine has integrated the real-time web into the results page.” The search giant announced the news Monday, saying it planned to roll out the feature gradually, and it looks like it’s live in the United Kingdom.

CES expected to be a smaller trade show this year, but still full of innovation – The International Consumer Electronics Show, the biggest geek fest in North America, has been shrinking thanks to the severity of the recession and its impact on travel plans. But the show’s organizer, Gary Shapiro said in an interview that this year’s show should be stronger than last year’s.

Hot air: Sarah Palin slams climate change summit — The former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that the summit in Copenhagen was a sign that science is being politicized at the expense of average Americans. We summarize Palin’s article, as well as some of the responses in the media.

Le Web: Q & A with Twitter, Square creator Jack Dorsey — Dorsey was interviewed on-stage at the Le Web conference in Paris, where he discussed the early days of Twitter, as well as his plans for his new mobile payments startup Square.

Music video supersite Vevo launches into a sea of fans, crashes — The site is a venture between Google-owned YouTube and the music industry to place YouTube-powered music videos in one spot — with higher-end advertising to monetize it. However, the site was incredibly slow on launch day, and it posted a message on Twitter saying it couldn’t keep up with traffic.

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Voxeo raises $9M for voice communications business

Voxeo said today it has raised $9 million in funding for its voice communications business.

The Orlando, Fla.-based company is focused on making open platforms based on what it calls “unlocked communications,” such as voice-over-Internet-protocol on mobile platforms or unified messaging and voice communications. It essentially helps companies run their phone systems using modern web-based technologies. The investors include North Atlantic Capital and the Florida Growth Fund. The company will use the money for acquisitions and other expansions.

In the past 14 months, Voxeo has acquired three companies. This is the first investment made by the Florida Growth Fund, a $250 million partnership between the State Board of Administration of Florida and private equity firm Hamilton Lane, which has $88 billion under management.

The company’s products include a self-service enterprise platform that lets companies automate their customer and employee communications via phone, text message, instant message, Twitter and more. It also has application servers for enterprises, enterprise VoIP platforms. The company has more than 100,000 developers that use its platforms to create products for 45,000 companies.

Voxeo was founded in 1999 and has 140 employees. Rivals include Genesys, Convergys/Intervoice, and Microsoft’s Tellme subsidiary. The company has seen triple-digit revenue growth for five years and has been profitable for 22 quarters.

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Casting Stones Before the FCC: Google Voice and AT&T

Ever since AT&T filed a letter with the FCC about Google Voice’s refusal to connect to certain areas, the two companies have been in a heated public battle. On the one side, AT&T takes the stance that as a carrier, Google is required to offer open access to all numbers. Nevertheless, in today’s blog rebuttal, Google asserts, “Google Voice is a free web application, one intended to supplement and enhance existing phone lines, not replace them.”

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In addition to outlining that it is not a primary telecommunications carrier, Google points out that AT&T has hypocritically lobbied the FCC for permission to block local phone carriers. The reason both organizations want to restrict these groups is because they charge high termination rates and partner with adult hotlines and free conference calling centers to further drive traffic. Google argues that it cannot continue to operate as a free service while paying these rates.

Meanwhile, AT&T asserts that while it prefers existing internet principles and does not want radical expansions under the FCC, if the Commission does choose to further regulate, “It absolutely must ensure that any such rules apply evenly – not just to network operators but also to providers of Internet applications, content and services. Anything less would be ineffective, legally suspect and, in all events, a direct repudiation of President Obama’s call for a ‘level playing field’.”

In your opinion should Google Voice be subject to the same rules that apply to AT&T or do you believe that web-based telephony groups like Skype, Google and Jajah should fall under a separate set of regulations?

Photo Credit: Aislinn Ritchie

Discuss

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T-Mobile negotiating to expand 4G service, Catherine Zeta-Jones going door-to-door

Word is that Deutsche Telekom (the parent company of T-Mobile) is now actively engaged in talks with Clearwire and MetroPCS to expand its 4G network. This isn’t terribly shocking to hear, considering that most other providers (including AT&T, Verizon and Sprint) are already either heavy into negotiations or in the process of upgrading their infrastructure. Though the company hasn’t yet said anything about planned expansions, word is its looking for the most “cost-effective” way to build nationwide networks capable of higher speeds.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

T-Mobile negotiating to expand 4G service, Catherine Zeta-Jones going door-to-door originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Bit.ly’s Grand Plans, And Their Inevitable Clash With Digg: Bitly Now

URL shortener and analytics service Bit.ly has been working on a new set of products, being referred to as “Bit.ly Now” internally, which will define the next stage of the company’s growth. The company confirmed these plans to us today. The services will include both a destination website as well as a distributed service via expansions to the Bit.ly API.

The core Bit.ly service, which lets users shorten web URLs into something suitable for Twitter and other services with limits on characters per post, has continued to grow quickly. 7 million URLs are shortened via the service each day, the company says, and 2-3 million of those are unique URLs Bit.ly has not seen before. Those Bit.ly URLs are clicked on 150 million times per week across a wide range of services – Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging, email, etc. Twitter itself now uses Bit.ly for URl shortening, and the service has quickly taken the lead in their market.

The magic behind Bit.ly are the stats that the service makes available on the underlying domains being clicked. Investor John Borthwick explained it all to investors in an email we obtained earlier this month:

bit.ly has been on a tear since we launched it last summer — let me sketch out what it is, why its useful and offer some data points on progress. bit.ly is on its surface a link or URL shortener, helping people take long and unwieldy links and make them short and easy to share via email, Twitter, Facebook etc. But once you shorten a link with bit.ly the fun begins. You can put a simple “+” on the end of any bit.ly link and see, real time, the pace at which that link is getting shared and clicked on as it moves around these social distribution networks.

Bit.ly Now will take all of this deep (and wide) data on popular real time URLs and turn it into a service. That’s where the inevitable clash with Digg comes in.

Digg shows popular links based on what people vote on, filtered massively for fraud. The Digg home page is populated with the top stories voted on by Digg users.

But only 20,000 or so new links a day are submitted to Digg (compare that to 2-3 million for Bit.ly). And Digg has to constantly fight users who try to game the system and get access to home page traffic. They also rely on users to categorize links and provide other metadata about the stories.

That’s why Digg launched their own URL shortener service, and are planning a new real time product of their own. The goal is to reduce the dependence on this flawed human voting system.

Bit.ly’s new Bit.ly Now service will show popular links at any given time, just like Digg (for now, Bit.ly sends the most popular link every hour to a twitter account). When Bit.ly Now launches, that link data will be combined with additional metadata about the URLs. In particular, they play to extract important entities, people and topics from the stories in real time, allowing for a categorized approach to popular links. Bit.ly says they are talking to a number of third party services, including Reuter’s Open Calais, to help them do this.

Those are two big advantages Bit.ly has over Digg – distributed link clicking data that is far harder to game than Digg, and automated real time categorization of links. But there’s a third advantage as well.

Bit.ly says that the data flow they are seeing is so massive that they are getting very good at predicting the number of clicks a link will get in the future. They look at acceleration of clicks as well as the source (Facebook, Twitter, IM, whatever) and whether people are clicking that are outside of the social graphs of other people clicking.

In other words, you could say that Bit.ly knows what will be on the Digg home page tomorrow.

They knew, for example, that the Neda Youtube video would be popular far before it was featured on CNN and other major media sites and then made its way to Digg.

The Bit.ly Now service will be both a destination site as well as a distributed service via the Bit.ly API. Third parties will be able to access the data based on topics or keywords. News sites may find this particularly valuable to monitor trends and supply additional relevant content to readers.

Perhaps even Digg may find this interesting. The real time stuff Digg is working on will overlap significantly with Bit.ly, we’ve heard. Digg will be looking for link information beyond what the Digg community adds directly.

The last thing Digg wants is to become reliant on Bit.ly data, though, with a directly competing Bit.ly destination site out there. If I were Digg, I’d start talking to Bit.ly now to see if I could find a way to avoid that situation.

It’s also clear that the new service will become a huge competitive advantage to Bit.ly’s core shortener service. Sites like ours, which use our own shortener service, will be left out of the Bit.ly service. Publishers who otherwise wouldn’t care will start to use Bit.ly to increase exposure in the ecosystem. Then the network effect kicks in – as more people use Bit.ly they get more data, making the service stronger, and forcing more people to use the service. It’s a great place to be.

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