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.