Today’s guest post comes from Dr. Brooklyn Walker at Hutchinson Community College, Kansas!
When teaching Introduction to International Relations, I lean on the framework provided by Frieden, Lake, and Schultz’s World Politics. The authors provide a III framework, defined by Interests, Interactions, and Institutions, which they then apply to various issues in IR. This framework is also helpful for students to compare and contrast the grand theories.
My students have at times struggled to see how this framework might help them analyze issues in international relations, so I turned to one of my favorite board games, Catan. Catan is an area control game in which players collect resources which they use to build settlements and cities, roads, and armies. The aim of this strategy game is to collect more points than your competitors; there are many different paths to winning.
The Set-up:
The day before we are scheduled to play, I bring a copy of the game to class. We slowly work through the rules and play a few turns so students get a sense of what the board looks like. On Canvas, I also create a collection of links to resources to learn the game. This list includes the official rule book, websites that summarize the rules (here and here), a website to play a sample game, links to YouTube videos that teach gameplay (here, here, and here), and some strategy guides for motivated students (here and here). I tell students that they can use whichever resources they find helpful, but that they need to be able to answer these questions:
- What are the different hexes? What do the number tokens mean?
- What resources are available, and how do you get resources? How do ports change your access to resources?
- What do you use resources to purchase? What’s the distance rule for settlements/cities?
- What are the special cards?
- What is the robber, and what does it do?
- What are the stages of a turn?
- What is the maximum number of resource cards you can hold in your hand?
- What is a victory point, and how do you get them?
- When does the game end?
On Game Day, I arrive early and set up the game boards according to the Starting Map for Beginners (in the Catan rule book). After the students arrive, we take a rules quiz. Students initially resisted the idea of a rules quiz, but later admitted that it incentivized learning how the game is played. And I’ve found that game day runs more smoothly when I’ve assigned a rules quiz. We quickly review the major rules, and then the fun begins!
As students play, I circulate, answering questions about the rules, suggesting strategies to players. The first time students play, one full game of Catan usually takes 45-60 minutes. Because we often don’t have time for both a rules quiz and a full game, I bring Ziploc baggies to class. When class time is running low, students put their pieces and cards in a baggie and take pictures of the board. When they return for Day 2, they set up the board using the pictures from the previous class.
Students in Dr. Walker’s class playing Catan.
The Debrief:
Once the games are finished, I distribute a worksheet for students to complete. It asks students to reflect on their game, and I invite them to complete the worksheet with the other students at their table. By discussing the questions together, they generate specific examples from their game of the concepts from the III framework. We then conclude with a full class discussion of the worksheet, and I make explicit comparisons between aspects of the game and what we’ve been learning in the class.
Catan Worksheet Questions
- What types of interests are you thinking about as you play? What do you care about maximizing, and why?
- Which kind of IR actor is a player most like, and why? How would you redesign the game to include other types of actors?
- How does your geography help or hurt you?
- Which aspects of the game resemble bargaining interactions?
- Which aspects of the game contain opportunities for cooperation? Why cooperates with who, and why?
- Does anyone (intentionally) break the rules? How did your table handle enforcement of rules? Did you follow the rules in the rule book, or did your table negotiate new norms?
- Does Catan best support a liberal or realist view of the world?
Challenges and Considerations:
There are a few challenges to using the game, though. One challenge is cost. Catan is not a cheap game, and it accommodates up to 4 players (though it is possible to purchase additional pieces to expand the game to 6 players). While it’s ideal to allow each person to play independently, students could play in pairs. Black Friday is a great time to pick up copies of the game at major retailers for as little as $25. I’ve also crowdsourced the game and found copies to borrow from friends and co-workers. And local game shops often have copies of Catan they allow patrons to play; I’ve borrowed copies and, in return, let students know about the game shop’s community game nights. A second challenge is that, for many students, Catan will be a new game with a more complicated set of rules than they are used to. My students reported that the rules quiz equipped them to play. But they also said that, if given the opportunity to play again, they would approach the game differently.
I’ve used this activity several semesters now, and students consistently describe it as a highlight of the course. Students reported that it was a hands-on application of the III framework that gave them a deeper appreciation for the strategic nature of international relations. And my students have said that this activity was a highlight of the semester for them, so much so that they sought out other opportunities to play the game and encouraged other students to take the class. I’ll take that feedback as a victory!