This game comes with a ton of components, 37 hexagonal region tiles, 96 coloured wooden cities, settlements (villages) and roads, 120 cards, plus dice, numbered chits, building guides and such. It has become a classic casual board game, often making it an entry level game for many players, and has won several awards.

Settlers takes more set up time than most games, and it helps if two players are familiar with setting it up. You have to arrange the hexagonal tiles randomly in a hexagonal pattern, this is important because the tiles are defined as woods, fields, crops,  quarries and mountains, and these regions act as resource points during the game. Then you lay the numbered chits on the tiles, the numbers vary from 2 to 12, and the only tile that doesn’t have a chit is the desert tile.

After this the players lay two settlements on the map at the intersections of the hexes, and one road along a hex edge adjacent to each settlement. The basic principle of the game is that at the start of your turn you roll 2 six sided dice. If you roll an 8 for example, any player who has a settlement adjacent to the hex with the 8 chit on it draws a resource card corresponding to that region. You draw wheat on crops and brick on quarries for example.    

You spend these resource cards to build new roads, new settlements or turn a settlement into a city, and will often find yourself trading resource cards with other players in order to get the cards that you need. A robber starts the game on the desert, and if you roll a 7 you can move the robber to another hex. This allows you to steal a resource card from a player that has a settlement or city adjacent to that hex, but most importantly any player with more than 7 cards has to discard half of them.

There is also a deck of development cards that you can buy with one wheat card, one sheep (fields) card and one ore (mountains) card. These development cards can give you victory points, which are helpful in winning the game, as well as bonus resources and the ability to move the robber to another hex. Typically players will pick up development cards when they can’t do anything more useful with their cards, but sometimes you can make it a winning strategy in itself to buy development cards.

Your initial placement of settlements can be crucial, as ideally you need access to as many of the five region types as possible, with numbered chits ranging from 5 to 6 and 8 to 9. New players generally fail to pick up on this and can suffer badly, losing by a margin of 10 victory points to 2 for example. Sometimes the die rolls are just bad, so that if you start next to a couple of 8s and 3s for example, the 8s might only get rolled a few times in a game, which can critically affect your planning.

Cities are worth 2 points, settlements are worth 1 point, you get 2 points for the longest road and 2 points for the biggest army, which is determined by soldier cards that are drawn from the development deck. The longest road is usually closely fought over, and a canny player will build his road across the middle of the ‘map’, cutting off the other players from expanded their own roads. Expanding your roads is very important in order to spread out and build more settlements and cities.

Once you get the game moving, Settlers plays pretty fast, unless one of the players gets into a protracted trading discussion over resource cards. So long as you keep resource cards coming into your hand you can at least feel as if you have a chance to be competitive. A couple of harsh losses can be enough to turn a player away from Settlers, but it is worth persevering with. The rules are easy and it has a few simple strategies to keep you occupied, and a fair amount of player interaction.

Settlers has a fair amount of expansions, including a 5 to 6 player expansion, as well as others that introduce new components and even more detailed themed elements like camel caravans and fishers and hunters. The hexagonal tiles make it very flexible, as you can create different shaped worlds to play on, and one edition has sea tiles on the outer edge with which you can create rivers and lakes instead. Settlers does need the expansions to a degree, to keep the game fresh and increase your options during play, while some of the expansions make it a superior game.  To be fair, the base game has enough of the resource management elements typical to other games, without the heavy thinking required, and is a good game to start with in a collection.