Settlers


Near my office is a cafe called Settlers; it’s in a row of shops and bars that starts with a vaguely lacklustre bar and ends with one of those karaoke joints where there are no windows and you have a terrible (but possibly unjustified) sense of foreboding when you walk past. Having said that, Settlers isn’t particularly dodgy; in fact, it won some sort of award in 2012 for being a good business in Singapore.

It’s named Settlers after Settlers of Cataan, one of those rather complicated boardgames that people get fanatical about but that I’ve never tried out. I think that’s because I damaged my psyche as a teenager by obsessing over Warhammer 40,000, which means I now only like games that are incredibly complicated and involve small plastic soldiers, or games that are very very simple and don’t require much at all. Settlers of Cataan, I assume, falls somewhere in between.

I didn’t prove this though, because there are many other games that you can play at Settlers (it’s not just a cafe, it’s a cafe with a wall full of games). My wife and I had visited to relax after both having stressful days. That meant we had to avoid rage-triggers like Monopoly (both classic and Singapore editions) but we still craved some novelty and excitement, so after battling to a draw at Mastermind, we picked up the box for Munchkin.

Disappointingly, the minimum number of players is three, and the rules (for a card game) are fairly complicated, but we decided to play it anyway. It turned out to be quite fun (any game where Lawyers are one of the monsters you have to battle is) but it was definitely a flawed experience to play between the two of us. Part of the joy of Munchkin, apart from the wilfully obscure rules, is when players can gang up or betray one another, and that’s not so enjoyable when there’s only one other person to retaliate/backstab/reinforce. I get the feeling that when you’re playing with six people and five of them are battling to ruin the leader’s day, it’s a lot more fun for everyone.

Still, we whiled away almost two hours there. Settlers was empty when we arrived, but as we came to the end of our second round of Munchkin some teenagers arrived, and played a game that consisted of screaming at the tops of their voices every time somebody put a card on a table. My wife has enough screaming in her day job to make this less than relaxing, and I discovered that I can’t cope with loud noises, so we cleared off after that. We now need to find a way to coax some of our friends to join in a game of Munchkin with us, though I’m not sure if I can trust my wife to gang up with me against opponents, or if she’ll use it as an opportunity to revenge herself on one of my domestic failings.

We walked home, and, having spent the evening happily in each other’s company, I took the chance to ignore my wife and play Candy Crush on Facebook. I’ll be punished for this by seeing tiny candies flit before my eyes as I try to sleep tonight, but the temptation of little computerised games is just too much…

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