Nine Muses

Though I had it in the back of my head somewhere that Catan had finally been released for the 360 (XBox Live Arcade), it didn’t really click with me until I was browsing through the Marketplace area to test my network connection.  (By the way, when a switch goes out, everything goes to hell, in case you didn’t know.)  I saw it, downloaded the demo, did the math to figure out the cost (about $9.00), and decided to go ahead and pick it up.

The big reason why I was convinced to buy it?  It has a single player mode.  And that single player mode is challenging, but not ridiculously difficult, which is the perfect sweet spot of difficulty.  I haven’t won yet, but a good 2/3 of my games have been “almosts.”  That’s on the “moderate AI” setting.  There’s also an easy and a hard option.  I’d rather play with friends, of course.  (Who wouldn’t?)  I don’t have enough local friends interested in this sort of board game, however, which makes an online variant an interesting option.  (The board game is for 3-4 players.)

It seems pretty true to the board game in how it’s played.  It easily has the same feel, though it’s been too long since I’ve played the board game to catch if there are any differences in nuance.

There are a couple different skins, so you can make the tiles pretty and 3D, use the basic one, or even pay a couple more dollars to get the original Mayfair skin.  I prefer the 3D one, because I like seeing the robber dance around.

My only complaint is that I can’t play multiplayer locally.  It’s either with folks online, or not at all.  What I’d really like to be able to do is play with J against two computer players, or play with J and one or two remote friends.  It’s just not set up for that, however, and I can’t think of a good way that it could be as you couldn’t hide cards from the guy sitting next to you if they’re displayed right there on the screen.  I guess for my two-player playing, I’ll just have to stick with the card game variant.