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The Settlers of Catan Card Game
Players 2
Personally, I have a love hate relationship with the original Settlers: and in that order. When I first started playing I could hardly stop myself gushing on about it to anyone I met. Family, friends, shop assistants, parole officers… all received a dose of my enthusiasm. Unfortunately, after playing it to death for about a month, the game’s flaws became more apparent. The pernicious influence of the dice rolls which you could do nothing about should they go against you; the tedium of the long end game where you could often see who was going to win half an hour before the finishing line was reached – oh, the horror. In the end I felt betrayed. It was a bit like when your wife leaves you, or when your best friend at school suddenly joins the bullies in flushing your head down the toilet, or when your stepmother locks you in a dark room for six days because you did not eat your spaghetti hoops… but I digress. Anyway, now I avoid it like the plague, but in order to placate my partner who still retains a fondness for the original, I invested in the card game. While it has not completely cured my Catanaphobia I have to say it is pretty good, and a game which stands on its own merits while retaining some of the essential features of the board game which made it such a hit. The game is well produced. As well as a large pack of high quality square playing cards you also get a couple of wooden bonus victory point markers and two dice – one is standard while the other is the event die which contains a variety of symbols. The goal is familiar. Each player starts with two connected villages, surrounded by a selection of terrain features which will produce the necessary resources to allow the players to build more roads, more settlements, new cities and to buy knights. Like the original game, a player with the most knights earns a bonus victory point. Production is again decided by the roll of the bones, although, in this case, only one die is used. Players still have the option to trade resources between them and the robber remains in the game, ready to pounce on anyone greedy enough to hang on to too many resources. The game is a race between the two players to be the first to develop a principality worth the requisite number of victory points – in this case, 12. Rather than a board, nicely drawn and colourful cards represent the individual empires. The artwork is excellent and retains the medieval fairy tale feel of the original. Each player lays out his cards in a grid: settlement cards connected by road cards with the whole thing surrounded by terrain cards. A principality will grow quite quickly and will take up a fair amount of space so you will need the grown-up’s table to play. The player turn contains a familiar order. Roll the dice, play out events, generate resources, buy new stuff etc. Upon this basic framework the card game has added several twists to the original mechanics as well as adding some completely new elements. The resource cards of the board game have disappeared. Instead the terrain tiles are rotated whenever their number comes up on the production die. Thus the terrain card will show the appropriate number of resources of that type held, from none to three. In this way the players’ terrain tiles act as a resource bank, depleted by rotation whenever the resources are used to buy anything. The robber will, when rolled, attack anyone who has hoarded more than seven resources. It is a neat mechanic which works well. Unsurprisingly, the card play element introduces the largest leaps forward in the game; namely the use of action and expansion cards. Taking the expansion cards first; these are played out of a player’s hand onto settlements and cities after paying the requisite resources: the more expensive ones being the most valuable. Also, there are limits on the number of these expansion cards a province can support: each settlement can support two expansion cards while each city can host up to four. The expansion cards – a mixture of knights, buildings and trade fleets – vary in function. They either confer a special ability (an advantageous conversion rate, for example, like the ports in the board game, or an increase in the production rate of certain terrain tiles) or up a player’s victory point total, or increase his holding in knights or trade symbols. The trade symbols work in an identical fashion to the knight bonus, in that the player with the majority of symbols takes control of the trade token, worth a bonus victory point while held. The more powerful cards – usually restricted to placement in cities – will fulfil more than one of these functions. On to the action cards. While there are not too many of these, they do give the game much of its flavour. These cards provide the means with which to attack your opponent, and also to defend against attacks. You can use action cards to burn down your oppo’s hard won buildings, pinch resources or take cards from his hand. A well-timed attack can really delay an opponent’s progress. The final component in the game is the Event die. This is rolled at the beginning of each turn and will trigger a variety of incidents: the appearance of the robber; the staging of a tournament; granting bonus production or activating the event card deck – which will produce a further variety of incidents: some good, some bad, some neutral. The card play also includes a memory element. This can be more than useful if you are up to it. All of the action and expansion cards are shuffled together and then divided into five separate packs. There will be times during the game when you will examine one of these packs before picking a card. If you can remember which important cards are in which deck you can cut down on the luck of the draw and plan a detailed and efficient long-term expansion strategy. It is worth giving this aspect of the game some thought as it is all to too easy for your hand to get clogged up with unplayable cards, severely limiting your options. Once the rules are digested the game plays at a good pace. From my experience it falls into several stages. First there is a race to build settlements. There are only an additional five to be gained and whoever gets the advantage of the 3-2 split will have a significant boost to their chances. Each new settlement brings two new terrain cards to a province, so the winner of the settlement race will have a two terrain advantage over his opponent, which can prove to be a game winner. After the settlement race the game settles down into steady expansion as the cities begin to appear and the struggle for the Knight and Trade tokens gets decided. The end game usually revolves around a race to be the first player to build that last expensive city feature which will take him past the winning post. I have to say that I quite like this game. At least I will let it into the house, unlike its elder brother. It certainly retains the positive aspects of the board game, while toning down on the negative elements which ended up breaking the game for me. I am afraid, however, that I can only say the bad bits are toned down, rather than eliminated. Resource distribution is much fairer now. Each player will at least receive something when the production die is rolled, as opposed to being forced to sit for ages with nothing coming in. Although, with the same result generating different resources for each player, there is still an element of luck involved as to whether or not you get that resource you really need to progress. While trading resources between players should theoretically help iron out resource shortages it is not something that happens very often. Well, think about it. Why trade resources when it will either benefit one player more than the other – in which case there is no point, or it will benefit both players equally – in which case, there is no point… So, as in the original board game, you are reduced to converting other resources in at a poor rate to get the ones you need. This game is a tight race and it does not take much to get an edge. Which brings me on to the other problem that remains in this version. Once you fall behind it is difficult to catch up, even though it could still take quite a while before your opponent is able to put you out of your misery by reaching the necessary victory point total. True, the action cards do give you some opportunities to attack, but these can be defended against, and are rarely more than an inconvenience even if they do strike home. Having said all that I do quite like this game. A lot of design has gone into it and it plays well. Kosmos have released extra cards for the German edition in the shape of five themed expansion sets. I have not seen these but, according to the grapevine, they add a lot to the game with at least two of them deemed to be excellent. Apparently Mayfair have made noises about producing an English version of these but, as yet, there is no specific release date. If you are a Settlers fan then you already own this game, if not, then it certainly worth getting if you enjoy the expanding range of two player card games coming on to the market. If you hate Settlers, well, this may make you hate it a little less. As for my rating, it is probably a little low. Put it down to my antipathy to the original game – for which I am still shelling out a fortune on therapy – and the fact that my wife always beats me at it. Rating 7.5
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This
is the card game component of the vast Settlers of Catan franchise. It has
grown out of the one title which has done more than any other to spread
the word about the new wave of games. If you do not know anything about
the original Settlers board game, then all I can say is welcome back and I
hope you have learned your lesson now that you have paid your debt to
society.