Settle in with your Family for Fun!

Mayfair Games award winning Settlers of Catan board game has now invited the youngest members of your family to come play with theirs!

Kids of Catan is a board game that children 3 years and up will find enjoyable; with it’s brightly colored wooden game tokens & sturdy rotating game board, parents and grandparents will find Kids’ construction reminiscent of a time when expensive board games were just made of flimsy plastic and paper pieces.

As the game begins, each player has a set of buildings to place. Placing a building uses a whole wagon load of resources includes one (each) of the following items: wood, bricks, and wheat.

The roll of an oversized wooden die (numbered one through three, two times) determines how far each wagon will move. When any child stops beside a resource that they need, they can load the resource into their wagon or choose to pass it up. Its strategic choices such as these that make the game interesting even to older children and make this game one that will stay with your children even as their understanding of critical thinking grows.

As the game continues and your wagon is full of resources, the players get to build a new house! The house must be placed in the right spot in the village. There are 6 houses to be built, a church, a gate, a baker, a butcher, a school, and a tower.

Most of these buildings are made out of two pieces of wood joined together, one for the body of the building and one for the colored roof. Every building is also printed with windows and doors so it’s easy to tell what they are suppose to represent even to younger kids.

After the houses are built, the resources are returned to the board so they can be collected again as others come around. When you build all your houses, you begin collecting resources again to build the Town Hall (which is a special building denoted with a bright green roof.) The player who builds the Town Hall wins the game!

Of course, children are also encouraged to play with the wonderful wooden buildings, and to create their own games and imaginative adventures in Catan!

Kids of Catan teaches and/or requires the following skills:

Understanding of Turns & Ordering: Game play is segmented into turns, where a player roles a die, the turn table moves, resources are collected, and buildings are constructed.

Randomization: A die is rolled to move the turn table variable amounts.

Understanding of Simple Trade: Players exchange three resources for one building.

Simple Pattern Matching: Differently shaped buildings fit in different places on the board. There is also some simple pattern matching implicit in collecting only one of each resource and turning in a complete set of three.

Simple Strategy: Players can learn strategy through putting used resources in empty spaces nearer themselves than their opponents.

Helping the game grow with your children
Invent house rules to make the game more interesting if you’re playing with older children. We’ve found suggestions on the internet we think are good with our kids and perhaps you’d like to try them too!

Alternate Robber Rule: This rule makes the Kids of Catan more like the adult Settler’s of Catan game. The rule goes… if you land on the robber on your turn (when you have rolled the die), instead of losing a resource you get to steal a resource from any other player’s cart! The resource must be the most “rearward” in the cart (similar to the regular robber rules) and it must be one that you can use (i.e., you do not already have it in your cart). If nobody has a resource you can use, nothing happens (we experimented with “take any resource you like from the board” instead of “nothing happens”, but we found that to be just little too powerful). If you land on the robber during someone else’s turn, the normal rules apply (you lose a resource).

No One Younger than You Robber Rule: This rule works much like our alternate Robber Rules only, here, you compare how many years old players are thusly letting children work a bit more with math. If, for any reason, someone refuses to admit their true age then anyone can steal from them and they cannot steal from anyone else. Further, if two players are both age five years old, they could steal from each other or from anyone older but not a four year old. Kids love comparing ages, especially when it gives them an advantage over older children & Mommy or Daddy.

It's Kids of Catan for your family game night now at a special featured price!
Also, read more about family game nights on our website by following THIS LINK.

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