Vent: Spent 6 years playing Catan wrong because I misread the robber rule

My buddy pulled out the rulebook last night after I got mad about a move he made... turns out the robber doesn't block you from building settlements on that hex, just from getting resources from it. I've been playing this since 2018 and nobody ever corrected me. Has anyone else found a rule they botched for years?

2 comments

2 Comments

eric_johnson4d ago

Took it a step further and realized I've been hoarding resources wrong for almost a decade. My group always played that you can only hold 7 cards max all game, not just when a 7 is rolled. We'd just discard down to 7 every single turn and never got the development cards we wanted because of it. Felt like an idiot when someone finally pulled up the actual rule. The worst part is we've all been playing board games for years and nobody ever double checked. Makes me wonder what other stuff we've been messing up without knowing. What other simple rules have you found that people mess up all the time?

jones.grace3d ago

Oh man, that's a rough one! I did something similar with Monopoly years ago. My cousin and I always played that you could only build houses on a monopoly if you owned all the properties in that color group, but we also thought you had to have three houses on each property before upgrading to a hotel. Turns out that's actually correct, but we also added a rule from some bootleg version that you could only build during your turn, not between turns. We'd end up with these weird 12-hour games where nobody could ever build anything because someone else always sniped the build phase. Found out later we were supposed to be able to build whenever, which would've made those games actually end before midnight.