Settlers of Catan is currently a best-selling, award-winning strategy board game in which players collect resources to make settlements and earn victory points. If you haven’t heard of it yet, you probably don’t have any friends who wear thick-rimmed glasses and keep up with game culture. If you have heard of it, you’re probably already Facebook friends with me. Either way, I’m sure after reading this parody, you can agree that The Daily Orange should never agree to let me write something so niche again.

Dear Settlers,

To make it as easy as possible to start playing Settlers of Campus, please start by reading the game rules below. Then, you will be ready for your first adventure on Campus. Have fun settling this new land together!

Game Rules

1. The island of Campus lies before you. The hill consists of 19 terrain tiles surrounded by the city. They teach you from your first day on the island not to go into the city. Your goal is to settle on Campus, and expand your territory until it becomes the largest and most glorious on Campus. Then, maybe one day, it will envelope the city itself.

2. There are five productive terrain types and one Career Services on Campus. Each terrain type produces a different type of resource (the Career Services produces nothing). Here’s what each terrain produces:
Events: Produce free food
Beds/couches/tables/floors: Produce sleep
Frats: Produce regret
Gyms: Produce facades of health
Libraries: Produce one hour of productivity after weeks of irresponsibility

3. You begin the game with two dorms and two promenades. Each dorm is worth one graduation point. You therefore start the game with two graduation points. Time is meaningless. Once you have begun you are already almost done.

4. To gain more graduation points, you must build new dorms and promenades and upgrade your dorms to luxury apartment complexes. Each luxury apartment complex is worth two graduation points and a restraining order. To build or upgrade, you need to acquire the resources mentioned above.

5. How do you acquire resources? Well, it’s simple. If I haven’t lost you yet, you should just read the directions, specifically steps five though eight, for the actual game this article parodies.

6. To receive resources — which you may only get rarely — you can network with other players. Make them an offer. A successful network might lead to a big trade opportunity.

7. You can only build a new dorm on an unoccupied intersection, unless that intersection was occupied by indigenous people, in which case you can totally just occupy it and mention nothing about it for a couple hundred years. Then you can realize that’s a pretty inhumane thing to do and acknowledge it whenever you have events, and people whose parents pay for them to go school here can make comments about how they think that’s “kind of unnecessary, you know?”

8. The first player to acquire 10 graduation points wins the game and gets a job as Lord of Campus. It’s an unpaid job with no benefits, but why would recent grads need anything more?

Patty Terhune is a senior policy studies and television, radio and film dual major. She has been playing a lot of Settlers of Catan recently and even downloaded the app so she didn’t need to find human friends to play with her. Follow her on Twitter @pattyterhune or email her at paterhun@syr.edu.

Published on April 5, 2017 at 10:12 pm