Extra Credit Settlers

A couple of years ago, BoardGameGeek user Joe Wasserman created a geeklist summarizing the games he uses in his high school class to teach economics. I posted some suggestions at the time, but it got me thinking about how I could bring boardgaming into my economics classroom. Unfortunately (at least in terms of my thinking), I've spent most of the last year and a half teaching quantitative courses.

This semeseter, however, I'm teaching Principles of Microeconomics. So, I turned my thoughts from Joe's geeklist into an extra credit assignment. Students wanting the extra points can play two (or more) games of Settlers of Catan and then answer one of four essay questions. The student can buy Settlers or he or she can borrow my copy. Here are the questions:

1. There rarely is enough of any resource (let alone every resource) in a game of Settlers of Catan. What big microeconomic idea does this describe? Since there isn't enough grain for you to build everything you want, buying a development card means not using the grain to build a city or trading it away for something else. What big microeconomic idea does this describe? Describe one situation during the game when you had to make a choice of how to use a resource card. What were your options for using the card? What were the advantages and disadvantages for each option? How did you decide?

2. Describe one trade that you remember making during one of the games. What card(s) did you trade away, and what card(s) did you receive in return? Explain how you eventually used the cards you received and why you preferred this to the cards you traded away. What big microeconomic idea is described by the fact that the trade made both you and the other player better off. Suppose that a "referee" cancelled your trade because it was "unfair." Would this make you better off or worse off? Would it have made your trading partner better off or worse off?

3. Even though there aren't "prices" in the game, were all of the resource cards equally "valuable." Select one of the games you remember well. Which resource was the most valuable in this game? Which resource was the least valuable? How can you tell that a resource is valuable (or not) even though there aren't any prices in the game? What factors (either particular things that happened in your game or general factors built into the game's rules) caused the valuable resource to be valuable and the non-valuable resource to be non-valuable?

4. How many times (in total) did the robber strike during your games? Of those, how many times did you control the robber (i.e., it was you who rolled the '7')? How did you go about deciding where to put the robber? What factors did you consider in making a decision? (Note that some of these may be strategic, and others may be personal.) How did your decision-making change as the game progressed?

So far one student has borrowed the game, and another has reserved it for spring break. We'll see how the answers turn out.