"A historical novel based on the board game 'The Settlers of Catan.'"

"[A] timely book...It’s All a Game provides a wonderfully entertaining trip around the board, through 4,000 years of game history."—The Wall Street Journal Board games have been with us longer than even the written word. But what is it about this pastime that continues to captivate us well into the age of smartphones and instant gratification? In It’s All a Game, British journalist and renowned games expert Tristan Donovan opens the box on the incredible and often surprising history and psychology of board games. He traces the evolution of the game across cultures, time periods, and continents, from the paranoid Chicago toy genius behind classics like Operation and Mouse Trap, to the role of Monopoly in helping prisoners of war escape the Nazis, and even the scientific use of board games today to teach artificial intelligence how to reason and how to win. With these compelling stories and characters, Donovan ultimately reveals why board games--from chess to Monopoly to Settlers of Catan, and more--have captured hearts and minds all over the world for generations.

The Catan Puzzle Bookis the perfect gift for fans of the Catan franchise who want to expand beyond the wildly popular board game experience. The timeless world of Catan is waiting for you to explore, build, settle... and solve! Inside the Catan Puzzle Bookare 100 original puzzles based on the wildly popular board game, providing a narrative adventure that allows you to discover the unsettled island of Catan. Alongside original artworks from Settlers of Catan, each puzzle contains its own pleasures and solving them allows you to win resources. Resources lead to victory points... and victory points lead to success! Contents: This book includes 10 chapters of puzzles, each containing 10 puzzles set in the Catan world. The puzzles may be solved on their own or as part of a narrative that runs through the book. Each correctly answered puzzle awards the reader resources, which can eventually be converted into achievements and victory points. Upon earning enough victory points, the reader wins the book! Catan Puzzle Bookis also fantastically illustrated throughout with more than 150 in-world artworks.

Tabletop and board games aren’t just for rainy days or awkward family events anymore. As the game industry grows, people of all ages are jumping to play “the original social network.” In our ever-increasing technological world, playing old-school games is a welcome retreat from the overexposure to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of social media. Over the past few years, board games have become the hot new hobby. Instead of friends sitting around the same table and staring at their phones, they are now either working with or against each other. Millions upon millions of new fans have begun to join their friends in real life for a fun game of Pandemic, 7 Wonders, or Ticket to Ride. The Everything Tabletop Games Book shows how to play some of the best tabletop games in the world, from classic strategy games like Settlers of Catan to great new games like Gloomhaven. Throughout the book, you’ll learn the different genres of tabletop and board games; how to play each game; rules and strategies to help you win; and even where to play online—including new expansions to keep your favorite games fresh and exciting. So gather up some friends, pick a game from this book, and start playing! You’ll be having a blast in no time.

Change how you think about Catan, your opponents, and level up your play! If you want to learn the intricacies of the game and tactics implemented by the top players in the world, then this book is for you. Author Mark Oxer is a board gaming enthusiast and has been competing in Catan tournaments at the local, regional, national and international level for over 15 years. During his time competing Mark has: Won the Catan Canadian Championships Won the Catan Masters Championship and holds a 5th All-Time Master Ranking Competed in many other Catan events, some of which include: Catan World Championships Guinness World Records Event: Most people playing Catan simultaneously Mind Sports Olympiad Digital Catan World Championship In this book, Mark goes beyond anything previously written and uses real stories to illustrate tactics, and ultimately provides a complete guide to the game of Catan. This book will be a reference piece that you will pull off the shelf more than once. It will inspire you to study the game, your opponents, and your own level of play. This is not just a book of rules, scenarios, and statistics, but a book written to change the way you think about Catan.

Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly—an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books—specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author’s emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life. Writer and critic Eric Thurm digs deep into his own experience as a board game enthusiast to explore the emotional and social rules that games create and reveal, telling a series of stories about a pastime that is also about relationships. From the outdated gender roles in Life and Mystery Date to the cutthroat, capitalist priorities of Monopoly and its socialist counterpart, Class Struggle, Thurm thinks through his ongoing rivalries with his siblings and ponders the ways games both upset and enforce hierarchies and relationships—from the familial to the geopolitical. Like sitting down at the table for family game night, Board Games is an engaging book of twists and turns, trivia, and nostalgia.

Constituting the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the twelfth Advances in Computer Games conference held in Spain in 2009, the 20 revised full papers cover topics from Bayesian modeling to incongruity theory and data assurance.