Settlers of Catan

Catan—More than a Board Game Tensions are high and everyone is extremely focused, which simply means everyone is close to winning the game. Relief hits me as I roll a 3 and acquire the ore resource card I’ve been patiently waiting to pick up for 3 rounds. I combine that ore with a wool and grain resource and draw a development card. As I look at the card, my heart begins to race. While keeping a poker face, I pass the dice to the next player knowing I can win on my next turn if nobody else wins before me. Fortunately for me, play advances twice without any action and only the roll of the player on my right remains before I get to announce my victory. As the player before me rolls the dice, a smirk begins to form on her face as she picks up her resource cards, places 5 of them in the pile and announces that she is building a city which gives her the victory.…

Settlers of Catan is a trading game in which players build capital and harvest resources. The game functions as a closed economy, in which opportunity costs, price of a good, and access to a good are constant, although trading with others does reflect some changes in relative prices. The object of the game is to be first to attain ten ‘victory points’. At the start of the game, the players are allowed to place two ‘settlements’ – each worth…

Opportunity cost is the potential benefit lost by choosing one option over the next best alternative. In Settlers of Catan, this is shown in various ways, including where you place your initial roads and settlements, where to move the robber, and what resource to use your year of plenty development card on when you are attempting to acquire the necessary victory points to win. This is extremely important in playing Catan, as you generally want to take the option with the lower opportunity cost…

Winnemucca wrote her book Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims in 1882. Winnemucca wrote this book to help highlight stories of her people and the interactions they had with white European and American settlers. Winnemucca hoped her writings would have the desired outcome of forcing change and getting public opinion and government officials on the sides of Native American tribes. Winnemucca portrayed cross-cultural interaction as inevitable. Nevertheless early interactions with white…

or more accurately the lack thereof, can have enormous effects on the psychological and financial well-being of a person. Throughout the history of America, work has been a great tradition that continues to be upheld in society today. Although forms of work continue to evolve with new technologies, the quality of work and work ethic remains the same. Roger Hill examines the change of work over the centuries, and evaluates the importance of work in early American society as well as in industrial…

wrote about the whites, - who were considered “civilized”, and how they treated the blacks – who were considered “uncivilized”, in Africa. During the settlement and colonization of Africa, the whites thought themselves to be superior to any human who was different from their color (i.e. Natives). This is well shown when Marlow described his first impression of Africa, when he saw the “Black shapes crouched…The work was going on…this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to…

socio-ethical roots acquired in their former lands back in Europe. Through their writings, the soldier, administrator and adventurer John Smith, Poet Anne Bradstreet and Governor William Bradford depict an America whose lands were initially hard to subdue and inhabited by a people wary of the settlers who kept coming in droves by ship. Disease, hunger, and natural calamities wiped out many of the pioneer settlers. Infighting and unclear leadership structures weakened the collective economic and…

world. While many believe that this ideal cannot be fully lived out without going completely homeless without a penny to one’s name, but in reality, when society breaks down life becomes easier when one lives to be their true self. A question that Kristen and the Travelling Symphony should have posed to all those they performed for would be is “survival [truly] insufficient” (Mandel 119)? While one may argue that survival is obviously imperative in a post- apocalyptic world, the meaning behind…

The historical norms of masculinity that led to the eradication of wolves in Yellowstone was the belief that man is a righteous hunter and wolves are seen as an evil hunter. This belief arose from the early American settler’s culture of fear of the wild creatures that they assumed inhabited the “wilderness”. The presence of wolves symbolized one 's existence with in the wildness. As such, it was long believed that wolves were an explicit representation of the wilderness. The early American…

For me, the understanding and colouring of the modern history of Blackstone Lake starts with the stories and biographies of the settlers that tamed and worked the land surrounding the lake. As they did so, a historical framework of personalities, knowledge of the of the lake and a system of morals developed. I started out to answer what seemed to be some major questions to ask the archives and of history itself. They being the origins of each settler, why they or their ancestors came to Canada,…