The avatars and hands floated and moved around as the people gestured and talked. The players with the Rift had two hands (to represent their two controllers), while those with the Go only had one hand. I was a viking helmet, while the other players were a cat, a wizard (represented by a wizard hat) and a masquerade mask. I love the tiny little details like the trees in the forest, the sheep in the meadows and even a mine cart in the ore-filled mountains.Įach of us were represented by different floating avatars. You can even change the artwork on the walls if you like. If you don't like the setting, there's also an option to swap out to a Japanese-inspired environment complete with shoji screens.
Yes, we were all playing Catan, while also apparently being on the island of Catan. In the middle of that room was the four of us, sitting around a virtual table, with a virtual Catan board laid out in front of us. Once I strapped it on my head, I was transported to what appeared to be a large room, with the iconic Catan sunset appearing in the distance.
I was set up to play the game with two other journalists as well as an Oculus spokesperson, with me on one of the Go headsets. You can disable notifications at any time in your settings menu. To be honest, I was skeptical that Catan in VR could capture the feeling of playing a real board game, but I was willing to give it a shot. It was even set up in a special area in the Oculus booth, complete with a giant mural of the Catan board on a wall and a fake board game table set in the middle. That's because the makers of Catan have partnered with publisher Asmodee Digital and developer Experiment 7 to create, you guessed it, a VR version of the popular board game, and release it at the show. It got to a point where, frankly, I played it so much that I got sick of it, and ended up deleting the app and giving the game away.īut at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, I was ready to reacquaint myself with an old friend. I too bought a copy for myself, and when the app version came out, I played it non-stop. And, it turns out, many others did as well - as of 2015, more than 22 million copies of the game (created in 1995) have sold worldwide. I didn't really know much about board games, aside from old classics like Monopoly, so when a friend brought it out at a party I was intrigued. If you were to try to find 1,000 players to roll bones and build roads around a fictitious island, it’s hard to imagine a better place.The first time I played Settlers of Catan was probably 2006. Spiel is the largest of its kind around, having drawn in 158,000 people last year with the promise of many dice and bratwurst. Saturday’s gathering of Catan players will take place in Essen, Germany, at the board game convention Spiel, which kicked off Thursday. Giant games of Catan have been played before, generally on an elongated board with a moderator calling the dice rolls, but the previous record stands at a meager 922. A thousand players will join together to play a single, incredibly convoluted game. To mark the 20th anniversary of Settlers of Catan, the board game that sparked the Euro-game revolution and a thousand petty squabbles, a bunch of cardboard jockeys will attempt to set a world record on Saturday.
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