This year, instead of recycling the same Amy Pond costume I’ve worn for the last two Halloweens, I had the foresight to combine my loves of board gaming and funtivities* into a costume, and thus Scott and I were The Settlers of Catan… and you can too.

* (fuhn-tiv-i-tees, plural noun, the condition in which shit like sparklers and sprinklers and parades exist)

Step 1: Some sort of brownish shoulder bag ($12-$15)

I purchased this Medic Bag for around $13 on Amazon, but received notice that it wasn’t going to show up on time, so instead I went to my local Army/Navy surplus store and found super cute map bags for under $15. Naturally, the medic bags also ended up showing up on time, so now I own four fucking brown bags and I bet I know what you’re getting for Christmas.

Step 2: Resources ($25-$30)

I did not want to haul around a heavy backpack full of real lumber, bricks and boulders all night, so lightweight yet representative resources were key. I got the artificial wheat and wood from a chain craft store – any store like Micheal’s or JoAnn Fabrics should stock them for around $5 a piece. Lightweight bricks are easy because for some reason football fans like to throw fake ones at their TV screens I guess? I bought these on Amazon for only $4.95. I also picked up this this freakin adorable sheepy from Amazon. I have no idea what Webkinz is but SHEEPY SO SOFFFFFT.

The rock (I don’t care if Settlers calls it “ore”, it’s a goddamn rock) turned out to be the hardest resource to satisfactorily procure. All of the foam rocks I could find on the internet looked stupid. All of the plastic rocks, like the ones you put in an aquarium or the ones you hide a key under outside, were upwards of $20 a piece. Hells no. Real rocks on scale with the other resources I had already purchased were fucking heavy. I ended up buying two yellow sponges from a craft store ($4 each) and spraypainting ($7 spraypaint) them greyish silver. They look kinda like moon rocks, if moon rocks were yellow sponges spraypainted silver.

Step 3: Accessories ($10)

I wanted to incorporate pieces from the game subtly into the costume somehow, but I didn’t want to lose or damage pieces from our actual copies (yes we own multiple copies of Settlers of Catan) in the process. I discovered this awesome German website which sells board game pieces on the cheap, including a remarkable inventory of Settlers stuff. I ordered several settlements and resource hexes, assuming I’d have several days to decide how best to use them.

Unfortunately the package showed up hours before my Halloween party so I didn’t really get much thinkin’ time. I put the Settlements in tubes I picked up at a craft store for about $3 and made necklaces using the twine ($4) I had bought to bundle the wheat and wood. I tried to use two more settlements to make earrings but the only crafting material I had on-hand was “velcro” and that proved to be not very helpful. I glued a couple of the resource hexes onto the sides of our hats.

I also made some “maps of Catan” to stick out of our bags to make the costume a little more obvious. I printed two pieces of paper that said “Map of Catan” and set the ends of them bitches on fire.

Step 4: Costume (free?)

LOL so after spending about three weeks tracking down all the optimal resources and game pieces, I sort of forgot about the fact that we needed to wear some kind of clothing with this shit?

Scott suggested that Catan was a nudist colony. I did not appreciate this suggestion.

I frantically searched websites and costume shops for something… “period-y.” Settlers is a board game that doesn’t actually have characters that takes place on a fictional island – there’s no specific clothing we needed to wear to make the costume work. My original thought was to do something like this, but have the vest and knickers be all red for me and and all blue for Scott so that we would represent the different colors you can play as in the game. Only… I have no idea how to sew or do anything remotely crafty with fabric. I tried cutting a t-shirt into a vest-like shape and we just looked like busted-ass Wal*Mart workers.

The night before our party we found hats ($10) at a costume shop that looked promising.

We decided that pairing those with white shirts and brown/khaki pants would be fucking good enough.

…but then I remembered I had this khaki dress that showed an impressive level of cleavage and decided to wear that instead because.

Step 5: Repeatedly trade bricks and sheep all night until your friends want to stab you.