There has also been some discussion on whether or not to include certain non-standard rules—house and tournament rules. So far, it looks like two such rules may be implemented as options that may be chosen in the downloadable version of Catan Online: "re-roll the robber" and "short tournament setup." The short tournament setup may also be used as an option in the Rated mode of the online version.

The "re-roll the robber" rule is: until each player has taken two complete turns, re-roll any rolls of a seven. Often, a player will fall way behind his/her opponents if an early 7 is rolled and the robber nullifies the production from one of his/her key hexes. This rule gives all of the players a good start to the game and allows them to mitigate the risk of the robber by expanding rapidly or buying a Soldier development card.

To speed up the game for certain time-limited tournaments, the setup up process is modified. Instead of placing a second settlement and a second road, a player places a city and two roads. This can reduce the time required to play a game of Catan to under an hour—a key requirement for some tournaments.

Most of the information displayed in Catan Online is the same as that displayed in the board game. However, handling implied information was a problem.

The first such problem we ran into was how to help the players decide on the best intersection to build on. In the German edition of Catan, the size and color of production numbers reflect how often hexes produce resources. In the English edition, red is used for 6’s and 8’s, while each numbered production token has a number of bullets indicating how many times out of 36 that number is rolled using two six-sided dice. By adding up the number of such bullets on the hexes adjacent to an intersection, a player can determine how often a settlement/city on that intersection will produce.

Unfortunately, such bullets would be illegible at the size usable in Catan Online. Initially, we had an onscreen key relating each number to its corresponding number of bullets, but no one really liked that approach. Eventually, we implemented a feature that shows "probability" values for each intersection that a settlement can be built on—this feature can be toggled on or off as desired. The probability value for an intersection is equal to the number of times out of 36 that a settlement/city on the intersection will produce resources.

In a similar vein, we had to give the players an idea of how many resources were in the bank at any given time. In the board game this is not a problem because a player can look at the stacks of remaining resource cards and get a rough idea of how many are left and how many are held by players. However, in Catan Online we had to compromise between giving the players a rough count and an exact count. We give you the exact number of each type of resource card left in the bank, but you have to open the Details window to get the information. When trading, this means that you must close or hide the trade window to open the Details window.

Certain design elements were required for Catan Online as a computer game that were not required for the board game. One of the most interesting ones was handling player inactivity or inaction.

In a board game, if you don’t resolve your turn quickly enough, your fellow players will usually give you grief until you do something. Lacking such an effective mechanism, we had to decide what the game would do if a player delayed taking actions or just stopped taking actions. To this end, the online, multiplayer version of Catan Online uses turn timers. Depending upon the mode chosen at the beginning of the game, you are given a number of minutes in which to complete your turn. If your timer runs out, a production roll is made if you have not already made one, and then your turn ends.

Currently, the modes being considered are: Standard, Speed, and Rated. The Standard game is "untimed," but after a certain period of time of inactivity a "stall" button is enabled. If any of the players click this button, a visible timer is turned on for the stalling player. The Speed game uses the tournament rules as well as having a fixed duration turn timer that is always on. The Rated game uses a turn timer, and an ELO rating system modified for multiple players.

In a similar vein, what do you do if a player leaves the game, either temporarily or permanently? Hopefully, in a board game, the player tells you whether or not he is quitting the game or just taking a restroom break; and you can decide what to do accordingly. In a computer game, this is not always the case. Currently in the online version, if you do nothing for a certain number complete turns in a row, you are replaced by an AI-player. The exact number of missed turns that will trigger replacement is still under discussion, and may vary depending upon the mode being used in the game.

That’s it until next time, when we take a look at the Catan Online user interface.