Barbarian Attack!

This next scenario is called Barbarian Attack.

I should explain the rules to you.  Another hex is added to the standard mix, being the castle hex.  It serves as the spot on which knights are placed.

Okay, here are the rule changes:

A new set of development cards replaces the standard ones:

Treason lets you move two barbarians from two hexes to two more hexes, and gives you two gold.

Intrigue lets you get a barbarian from any hex and adds it to your prisoners.

Knighthood lets you put a knight on the castle hex.

Black knight lets you put a knight anywhere.

I'll get to what these terms mean, but knights go on PATHS.  Not intersections, not hexes, PATHS!

They're these little wooden nitey-witey things that you have six of.

Now, whenever someone builds a settlement or a city, they roll the dice three times.  They put a barbarian (little gold men) on the coastal hexes (there's a specific way to arrange the number tokens) with those three production numbers.  If there are any repeats of 7s, the dice are re-rolled for the placement of that barbarian, and the most barbarians that can be on a hex is three.  If there are three barbarians on a hex, the number token is turned upside-down and the hex stops producing.

But that's not all.  If a settlement/city is surrounded by conquered hexes, it is turned on its side.  You don't get production from it (quite obvious, as there's nothing for it to get production from), you don't get victory points from it, and you don't get harbors from it.

So barbarians are bad.

Very.

Luckily, there's a way to get rid of them: knights!

You get knights from development cards Knighthood and Black Knight.

At the end of your turn, you can move your knights 3 paths, but you can increase it to 5 once per turn per knight by paying a grain.

If there are more knights surrounding a conquered hex than barbarians after a player moves their knights, the barbarians are distributed among the owners of the knights.  One barbarians is distributed among the owners of the knights' prisoners, until there are less barbarians than owners.  Then a roll-off ensues for the rest of the prisoners.

However, then some knights are lost.  You'll notice that in the rulebook, each path of the castle is marked with a dice roll.  After a coastal hex is freed from the barbarians, a die is rolled.  Find the path on the castle marked with that die roll, and find all knights on the just-freed hex parallel to that path.  Those knights are removed.

HOWEVER, a player receives 3 gold for each knight removed.  What's gold good for?  2 gold, up to twice per turn, equal a resource.  It can be traded and traded for like a resource.

One more thing.  Each pair of barbarians in your prisoners is worth a victory point.  Prisoners are good.

The game is played to either 12 or 13 VPs, I think 13, though I don't remember.

Now, the game.

Initial board:

(Sorry, forgot to take an initial picture.)

I didn't have a 5 for a while, until I got the settlement on the coastal pasture 5, and 5 was getting flipped a lot.

The game progressed as any other, but the excitement was near the end.

Ashley (red) got in the lead, and was about to win by building on one of the outer islands, when the barbarians came, conquered her settlement with the ore harbor, thereby removing her harbormaster, making her lose 3 VPs.  She still got a lot more while I was trying to get enough VPs to win before her.

She was about to free her settlement (or build another, or a city, or win some other way - I don't remember) when Mom traded me the cards I needed to build a city and get that final victory point, winning.  I had plenty of prisoners.

Now, you might wonder why I build a settlement on that mountains 12 and nowhere else.  There's a limitation that you can't build roads or settlements on conquered hexes, and it was the closest place to build a settlement while obeying that rule.  Plus, it's pretty protected from barbarians.

So, all in all, I won.  WOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Mom was pretty close to winning, but not as close as Ash and I.

Anyway, the reason it's taken me so long to make this post is because I've been caught up in another game, Rivals for Catan.  It's basically a Settlers-like game for 2 players.  Due to how the cards are and how dependent on them players are, I'd compare it to Cities and Knights crossed with Catan Event Cards.  It takes a bit of explaining the rules, so I'll probably do that for my next post.

Rivers of Catan

Sorry I didn't get to this earlier!  I've been on vacation, and ever since I got back, it's kept slipping my mind!

Anyway, to the game: The Rivers of Catan.  The rules are simple.  You get one gold for each settlement and city you build on a river, and you can build bridges (two brick and a lumber) across a river or at its delta.  A bridge acts like a road, but you get three gold.

So what is gold for?  Up to twice during your turn, you can buy a resource for two gold.  However, the player(s) with the least gold lose two victory points, while the player with the most gets an extra victory point.  As usual, ten VPs wins.

Now, to the game I played.  Here was an initial image of the board:

I didn't get a 6 until near the end of the game.  Anyway, though I got a victory point card, the main competition was between my sister (who was the richest) and my mother (who was tied with me for the least gold, though we had an impressive sum.)  The biggest competition was for the longest road.  An image of Ashley's, for instance:

You won't believe this, but the turn she won, even being a poor settler, my mother needed only two victory points more to win, and got them.  She managed to get the longest road by building six roads!  

The final image of the board:

Oh, and, by the way, I'm white, my sister is red, and my mother is blue.  I know this is a bit late, but I managed to say it in time!

In the time I haven't been blogging, I've played every T&B scenario, and plan to play Traders and Barbarians combined with Seafarers soon!

The Fishermen of Catan

Now, to go over the scenario called "The Fishermen of Catan".  There are some fishing ground pieces that go on the frame, a bit like harbors, with a number on them, and the desert hex is replaced by the lake hex.

For the preparation, here is what you have to do different (other than what I just told them).

The fish tokens and old boot are mixed and put in a stack next to the game board.

The robber stays to the side of the board until a "7" is rolled or a Knight is played, as there is no desert for it to start on (it was replaced by the lake).

If you build your second settlement on a fishing ground or the lake, you get a fish token instead of a resource.

Now, the game.

The fishing grounds produce a fish token (two for a city) when the indicated number is rolled, and the lake hex is similar.  It produces for 2, 3, 11, and 12.

Fish tokens can have one, two, or three fish on them, or they can be the old boot.

You can discard fish tokens to perform certain actions (though any excess fish from tokens with multiple fish on hem are lost).  For two, the robber is driven off the board.  For three, you can steal a card from anyone you want.  For four, you get a resource of your choice (not a commodity for Cities and Knights), and for five, you get a free road.  Seven gets you a development card!

You can only have up to 7 fish tokens.  If you would get an 8th, you can discard one of your existing ones to draw one.

The robber cannot steal fish, they cannot be traded, and they don't count against your hand limit of 7 cards when a 7 is rolled.

So what's the old boot?  When you draw it, you must reveal it immediately, and you need one more victory point to win.  However, you can give it to anyone you're tied with or losing to.

Victory conditions are the same as they would normally be (but you need one more victory point if you have the old boot).

Next, I'll go over The Rivers of Catan.  I hope I do soon!

Traders and Barbarians

Hello!  I got my father the Traders and Barbarians expansion for Father's Day, and wanted to share what it is with you.

It's pretty much a hodgepodge of different variants and scenarios.  Here they are.

Variants

First of all, there's the friendly robber.  The backstory: Isebold and his band of robbers have mysteriously disappeared, leaving a new robber, Rob de Hood (sound familiar?), who will only steal from rich settlers.  The only difference is that if you still have two victory points (for combinations, for example, with Cities and Knights, the number of victory points you started out with), nobody can put the robber on you or steal from you.  Really nice!

The next one is the harbormaster.  Pretty simple.  A settlement on a harbor is worth one harbor point, and a city on a harbor is worth two harbor points.  You might be wondering: what are harbor points good for?  The answer is that whoever has the most harbor points (given it's at least three) gets the harbormaster, worth two victory points!  This variant increases the number of points required for victory by one.

Now, the event cards.  They replace the dice.  Every turn, you reveal the top card in the deck and do what it says.  They have a production number to produce resources.  As simple as that.  For setup, you shuffle, put 5 cards under the "New Year" card (which, when drawn, prompts you to repeat this and draw a new card for production), and put all the rest on top of it.

And finally, Catan for two!  This is a two-player version of Catan.  Two "dummy players" (as I call them) start out with one settlement each in predetermined spots, and setup continues as normal.  Whenever you build a road or a settlement, you build one for a "dummy player", also (if a settlement isn't possible due to the distance rule, build a road instead).  Dummy players can get the longest road.  You roll the dice TWICE on your turn, and if the second result is the same as the first, keep re-rolling until you get a different result, and use that result as the second.  You start the game with five trade tokens, and get more trade tokens for completing certain actions.

Building a settlement on the coast gets you a trade token.

Building a settlement on the desert gets you two trade tokens.  (If you build a settlement on the coast and the desert, you get three trade tokens.)

You can take any knight out of your army in the competition for the largest army and get two trade tokens.

On your turn, you can pay trade tokens to either drive the robber back to the desert, or to draw two cards from your opponent and give them two of your choice from your hand.  How many trade tokens do you have to pay, you may ask?  One if you're losing, two if you're winning.

I'll do the campaign scenarios in a separate post, perhaps one post per scenario, as all of them are a bit more complicated than these.

Goodbye for now!

Strategies for Seafarers, Cities and Knights

Okay, now I'm going over strategies for the Seafarers expansion.

A lot of players will try to build on a good gold field and surround it with cities.  Be careful about this, as this spot will likely be a robber magnet.

Wool are made important, as you need them to expand across the water.  In fact, in some scenarios, they're even more important than brick.

The longest trade route isn't as hard to get, as you can use ships and roads to get it, and if you have a lumber and only one of brick and wool, you can still expand on your longest trade route.

In The Four Islands, Into The Desert, The Fog Island, and Heading For New Shores, try to get the extra victory points for expanding to foreign areas (or, in the case of The Fog Island, try to reveal the fog-covered hexes so you can be the first to build on them, and get the resources as prizes for revealing them.)

Generally, it's best to use the robber instead of the pirate, unless you're racing to an island against another player, as the ability to shut down a hex's production is a lot more powerful than shutting down another player's ability to build ships.

Don't get too worried about where you're going to put your ships, as you can always move them.

Now for the Cities and Knights.

There are a couple of main strategies one can use.

You can focus primarily on building knights, in which case you need pretty much everything!  You need wool and ore to build knights, coin because a lot of blue cards involve knights and so you can upgrade your strong knights to mighty knights, grain to activate your knights, and brick and lumber to build roads so you have more spots to build them.  You should build your knights so they can chase the robber off your more productive hexes, as well as avoid displacement by opponents' knights.  The green card smith lets you upgrade up to two of your knights for free, and paper is also nice because of the ability to grab any resource you want for a roll that doesn't produce anything for you.

Paper is really nice in any strategy, as you can use it to get whatever you want for a roll that doesn't get you anything, and you can also get really useful cards, such as the inventor, which lets you swap any two number tokens on the board, road building, which lets you build two roads (or ships, in seafarers), medicine, which lets you upgrade to a city for an ore and a grain less, and others.  A metropolis also gets you two points closer to victory.

There are two ways to protect yourself against the barbarians: city walls and knights.  Knights are nice because they can be used to chase off the robber, but city walls are nice because you can use them to increase your card-carrying capacity by 2.

If you want to trade a lot, your best bet is cloth.  Yellow cards deal with trading, the merchant gets you a victory point, and you can trade commodity cards at the 2:1 rate.  The Master Merchant is useful if you are losing.

Oh, and do try to get a bunch of commodities.  They all come in real handy, giving you progress cards at no charge, some abilities, and extra victory points in the form of metropoli.

And now for the combination of Seafarers with Cities and Knights:

There's not much change here, except it's less risky to build a bunch of cities on a good gold field because you can use a knight to drive the robber off it.

Strategies

Okay, now, time to talk strategy.

There are a couple strategies (other than the obvious "get a source of everything and expand to good spots" one.)  Here are some for basic Settlers:

At the beginning of the game, the most important resources are generally lumber and brick, as you need them for settlements and cities.  Later, you will need ore and grain more, as you need them for cities and development cards.

If there's a resource you don't have a good (4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10) source of, try to build close to a source of it so you can build roads to a settlement on that spot.

A VERY obvious strategy: if there's a resource you have bucketloads of, try to build on the port, either during setup or during the game.  This strategy has helped me out, though in the experimental game where I had sources of only lumber and a lumber port, it didn't work out so well.

In every single game, try to get either the longest road or the largest army.  It's not easy to win without them.  Do whichever is easier for you.

Development cards can be the most useful things, especially knight and monopoly.  Monopoly lets you name a resource and get all of that resource there currently is.

Another strategy to play is to primarily get cities and development cards by having a good source of ore and grain.

I should mention: try to have fun!

The Four Islands

Hello, Me again, and last night at 8:00 PM, I started a new game of The Settlers of Catan.  This was the Four Islands scenario of Seafarers, nothing special except for that.  We used the variable set-up.  I should introduce the players that usually play, shouldn't I?

I can't guarantee that they're the only players, but here they are:

There are my parents (mother and father, of course).

My sister also plays from time to time, and sometimes, my friends, Matthew and Nathan play.

Anyway, this was a four-player game with my parents and sister.  I was white, my sister was red, my father was orange, and my mother was blue.  That is, those are the colors of pieces they used.  We weren't painted red, orange, white, and blue!

Here was the board after set-up:

I was first to build a settlement, and also first to settle on a new island.  I blocked my mother's first settlement on a new island:

And got a grain port.  All this time, my father and sister were having a battle over the longest road.  I did not have a 4 or a 10 to get resources from, unfortunately, and 4 was getting rolled a lot.  That must have been my downfall.  Everything else, though, other than 2 and 12 (and, of course, 7), I got resources for!  My sister managed to win with a settlement, a city, and two settlements on new islands:

She really surprised me!  I wasn't expecting the sudden competition!

Ah, well, there are worse things!

You might notice I haven't talked about Traders and Barbarians.  It's basically a jumble of slight rule changes and scenarios that can be played.  I don't have it, but I know about it.  That's why I haven't blabbered on about it yet.

The Cities and the Knights

Ooooooookay, you want to know about the Cities and Knights expansions?  Here you go:

So many things, where to start?  Ah, yes, for the set-up phase, when you're first setting up, when you build your second settlement, you put down a city instead.  Therefore, you start with 3 victory points instead of the usual 2!

Instead of a building cost card to tell you what resources you need to do things, you have a new development flip chart.  Now what is a development flip chart, you may ask?  You can flip it with commodities (more on that later).  On your turn, there's a third die to roll.  If the barbarian ship is rolled, move the barbarian ship on the barbarian tile one space forward.  When they reach catan (every seven barbarian rolls), good or bad things happen, depending on the knights.  More on that later, too.

If it comes up yellow, green, or blue, you look at the corresponding flippity-flippity thing on your development flip chart, and compare the red die numbers shown there with the one on the red die.  If they match, you draw a progress card of the same color as the one on the third die!  (Progress cards replace development cards in this game.  No development cards.  (Sorry!)  All of this is done before you receive resources.

Now, receiving resources.  For a settlement, it's done the same way as in regular Settlers.  However, it's done differently for cities.  Well, it's done the same for fields (grain) and hills (brick).  For the other three, forest (lumber), pasture (wool), and mountains (ore), you get one resource produced by that hex and one commodity: paper, cloth, and coin, respectively.  You use them to flip the development flip chart.  Yes, I'm about to get to those, so hang on.  If you're playing Seafarers in addition to Cities and Knights, you cannot receive commodity cards for gold field hexes.

There are new things you can build.  You can build a city wall for two brick, putting one of the squares underneath one of your cities and increasing lethal capacity by 2 cards.  (Lethal capacity is the maximum number of cards you can have for a 7 without having to discard any.  Yes, I made up the term.)  They help protect you against the barbarians, which I'll get to later.  Postponing a bunch of things.

You can also build knights, which have actions that I'll get to.  I'm doing this in the same order as the rulebook, by the way, so that's why I'm getting to things later.  You put them in places just like settlements, though they don't have to not be adjacent to anything.  You can have two knights right next to each other, or a knight and a settlement.  Building or promoting a knight takes a wool and an ore.  If you promote a knight, you replace it with the kind of knight with one more ring around it.  The two-ring one can't be promoted to a three-ring one unless you've flipped enough coin (YES, I'M ABOUT TO GET TO THAT, JUST HANG ON!), and knights with three rings cannot be promoted.  You wonder why knights get promoted?  You'll have to wait to hear about their actions and the barbarian army.  Activating them so they can do things costs a grain.  Flip them to the colored side.

Okay, the flippity-flipping.  They look just like resources from the back, and all rules applying to resources also apply to commodities.  For instance, the robber can steal them (though the stealer still must blind-draw, they cannot ask specifically for a resource or a commodity), and you can trade them and for them exactly like resources.  However, if something, such as a progress card, says "resource", then it means resource, not commodity, and if it says "commodity", it means commodity, not resource.

So flipping.  In each color of your development flip chart, there are some commodities that you can build something with.  You pay the commodities, and then flip that section of the flip chart down.  Now you have revealed another section, which lets you get progress cards for more rolls and requires one more commodity to flip.  Once you've gotten to the part where you pay three commodities, you get a special ability.  For coin, you can upgrade knights with two rings to knights with three rings.  For cloth, you can trade any two commodities for any one resource or commodity.  It basically gives you all three commodity harbors (not that there are any commodity harbors).  And for paper (This one I highly recommend focusing on unless you collect resources for almost every roll already), if, when the dice are rolled, a 7 wasn't rolled, and you normally wouldn't collect resources or commodities for the roll, you may take any one RESOURCE of your choice!  Great!

Ah, the metropoli!  The next time you flip, assuming no one has gotten it yet, you get a metropolis of the color you just flipped.  There's one metropolis of each color, so don't panic if someone has already gotten a metropolis of a different color.  Well, all of the metropoli are yellow, but they each have a corresponding colored token that's colored the color of the metropolis.  You put the metropolis on one of your cities, and the colored token goes on your development flip chart.  The metropolis is immune to the barbarian army, and is worth 2 extra victory points, in addition to the 2 provided by its city.  However, if someone gets the last flip on their development flip chart before you do, they get your metropolis.  Yes, the barbarians can destroy cities.  YES, I'm getting to that!  Just wait until I've talked about what knights can do!

So, progress cards.  Unlike development cards, you can play any number of them on your turn, and on the turn you get them.  With the exception of the green alchemist card, they are played on your turn after you roll the die.  You might want to consider playing your cards if anyone has blue cards, as the blue spy card lets you look at an opponent's hand of progress cards and steal two.  You CANNOT trade progress cards or steal them with the robber.  If you draw a fifth progress card after you have four, you discard one.  If you draw a victory point card, you must play it immediately.  Some game-changing progress card include the green alchemist, which lets you decide what the dice will roll on your turn, the green inventor, which lets you swap any two number tokens on the board besides 6, 8, 2, and 12, the blue deserter, which lets you steal an opponent's knight, the blue saboteur, which forces everyone tied with you or ahead to discard half their cards, the blur spy, which lets you steal an opponent's progress card, and the yellow master merchant, which lets you steal any two resource or commodity cards from any player with more victory points than you.

So what can knights do?  You can deactivate them to perform one of three actions, though you cannot do this the turn you activate them.  You can move it to another spot along the road it's on (or trade route, in Seafarers).  If you have a road to an opponent's knight of inferior (lower, not the same) power to yours, you can force it to move to a spot along your opponent's road (or trade route) adjacent to the one it's on, and move your knight to where it used to be.  Finally, you can chase away the robber (or pirate, if you're playing Seafarers) to another hex of your choice and steal like normal.

There is one other thing that knights can do.  They can defend Catan from the barbarian army.  When the barbarians reach catan, count the number of cities on board.  (A city with a metropolis still counts as one.)  That number is the strength of the barbarians.  Now add up the rings of the knights on board.  That is, a one-ring adds one to the total, a two-ring adds two, and so on.  This number is the defenders' strength.  If the barbarians are stronger, whoever contributed the least to the defenders' strength loses a city or city wall, or whoever tied for contributing the least.  If the defenders are stronger or equally strong, whoever contributed the most gets a Defender of Catan victory point card.  If more than one person ties, everyone who ties draws a progress card.  Either way, the barbarians go back and all knights are deactivated.  If the barbarians pillage your last city, you cannot flip your development flip chart until you have a city.

Ah, yes, the merchant.  One of the yellow progress cards lets you move the merchant.  He basically gives you the 2:1 port of your choice, as long as you can get that resource and no one steals it with another merchant card.  He's also worth a victory point.

This game is played to thirteen victory points.

Whew, that was a lot.  A LOT!

The Seafarers of Catan

Hello, Me again.

Now I want to talk about the Seafarers expansion for The Settlers of Catan.

As before, normally, a random setup is used.  There are preconstructed scenarios that you can use, however.

Here are the differences:

You can build a ship (a wool and a lumber) like a road, but it goes across water.  On a shipping route, you can move a ship that has nothing attached to one end to anywhere along that shipping route.  You can do this once per turn.

Depending on the scenario, you can get different amounts of victory points for settling on new islands that you haven't settled on before.  For instance, in the "heading for new shores" scenario, you can get two victory points for each new island you settle on.

All rules that apply for roads also apply for ships.

There is a new gold field hex that will produce any resource.  If you receive multiple resources for one gold field, they do not have to be the same resource.

And then, there is the dreaded pirate.  The pirate acts just like the robber, but he goes onto sea hexes, and instead of blocking resource production for a hex, blocks ship production on that hex.  You cannot move ships onto that hex, you cannot move ships off of that hex, and you cannot build ships on that hex.

The specific scenarios have too much variability to describe, so I'll let you look at the rulebooks to see all of the scenarios!

Yes, the Seafarers expansion is fun, as all of them are.

Intro

Hello, my name is Me, and I should warn you that I love this game (which is called The Settlers of Catan)! It consists of a core game with several expansions.  Yes, I would highly recommend it.

I'll describe each game progressively, though not all in the same post.  Here's the first.

The Settlers of Catan, the core game, is essentially a game of collecting the resources of lumber, wool, grain, brick, and ore to expand your empire.  You need to build roads (a brick and a lumber) to get to spots to build settlements (a brick, a lumber, a wool, and a grain), which will provide you with more resources.  Development cards (a wool, a grain, and an ore) let you do things such as build two roads, or steal all of a particular resource in circulation.  Settlements can be upgraded into cities, which produce twice the resources they normally would.

You can also build settlements on ports so you can trade resources with the bank.

Settlements are worth one victory point each, while cities are worth two.  The first person to get to ten wins!

I should warn you about the robber.  It can block your production of one resource, but can be chased away by knight cards, which also increase the size of your army.

The person with the longest road gets two extra victory points, while the person with the largest army also gets two victory points.

The setup of the board will always be different, though the shape and size are the same.  You never know what to expect in this game (though wool usually seems to be common for some reason)!