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!
Sunday, June 19, 2011
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!
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!
Sunday, June 5, 2011
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.
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!
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!
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