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!