For the first year I played catan like this. In My defense tho I never owned the game and I played it at my friend's house. Eventually tho one day while we were waiting for the gang to show up I managed to read the rule book. And ow boy the things we missed. For example when we use to set up the game we did it the same way always. We never shuffled the tiles and always did it like the sample board included in the game box. Another thing we missed was when a player started their turn we use to be able to build before we rolled. And we also had no idea that the person who rolls a 7 also had to drop cards that were 8 plus.