by iromsdahl
We had just returned from a trip up north to the cabin. One of the popular cabin games was Catan Junior. My "junior" in this case had spend all weekend playing against grandma and mom and showing them his "undefeatable" strategy of parrot card control. They continually oohed and aahed over his impressive strategy skills for one of such a young age.I knew that this fledgeling strategist must be brought low, and soon.
One night, when all was quiet. I called to him from the kitchen table. He looked up from his transformer cartoons, received my challenge and the education commenced.
Once again, he began spamming the coco parrot cards as he had learned well to do. The first coco was a free fort, and it also gave him coco superiority and a fort on ghost island. The current score was 2 forts (me) to 4 forts (him).
The first half of the game, I thought maybe this was going to turn out badly for me. Chaining his coco cards, my son soon had about 10 cards in front of him and solid control of Ghost Island.
But the one thing he was not drawing was free fort cards. So while he continued to have the majority in forts, I had caught up to him in "practical forts" aka the forts harvesting resources.
The next "free fort" parrot card he drew, he was forced to use it to build a ship, since he forgot to build those out ahead of time using his ample supply of wood and goats.
Finally we neared the last turns of the game. He drew a ghost pirate parrot card, and chained that into another ghost pirate parrot card but eventually ran out of resources without gaining another fort. I had gained another "practical fort" and the score was 6 forts for me (all on the board) and 5 forts for him (4 harvesting forts and 1 on ghost island).
He was overwhelmed by my superior resource mining and eventually defeated. He took his loss like a man, claiming it was a result of an injury to his hand earlier in the day and being distracted during our match.
In truth, it was the best game of Catan Junior I have had the privilege to play.
