Six months of wedded bliss!

1st Annual B-day Catanarama

Once upon a time on a cold and blustery Minnesota day a beautiful baby-girl was born. An unspecified number of years later we have been celebrating this joyous occasion with a special tournament playing the marvelous game by the name of Settlers of Catan; a multi-player boardgame from Germany. We REALLY like this game and jumped at the oppertunity to do some serious 'Catan-evangalism'.

Since we are known to have a version or two we went all out and setup 1 board in the front-living room (Std. Catan 2008, English), 2 boards on the Kitchen/Dining table (Std. Catan, German and Std. Catan, Dutch), 2 boards in the back-living room (Std. Catan, English and Catan - Travel edition) and in the basement - the big kahuna version of the game - the 5/6 player extended version of Catan combined with the 5/6 player extended version of Cities and Knights. Furthermore, we had 4 computers running, all displaying the computer-version of the game and we had a nice display of all the 2008 versions of the extensions and Catan, the card-game. In short, plenty of gaming oppertunities.

Since we had given ourselves the renewed 2008 versions of Catan and all the extensions we decided to christen it by playing the 2008 standard edition in the front-living room. Around 4pm the first number of guests arrived topping out around 8pm with 16 people playing on 4 different games at the same time. We made it a tournament by awarding points for every game played and bonus points for playing in either German or Dutch or playing the Cities and Knights version. At the end of the evening the top 4 got some 'fabulous' prices (see picture) courtesy of the Canton Salvation Army.

It turned out to be one of the most enjoyable and memorable birthdays Jen has ever had (granted, everything after 6 months becomes a little blurry...;-) but we had so much fun, we might make this a semi-annual or quarterly tournament...

We hope to see all of you at one or more of the future Arlington Road Catanaramas.