The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Settlers of Catan Card Game

What you get: For $20, you get 120 cards of varying sorts, 2 wooden tokens, 2 wooden dice, a rulebook, and a plastic holder for all the components. The production value of all of the components is solid and sports the standard understated quality of Catanian art.

Why you need it: Settlers of Catan is a great board game of building and trading. The unfortunate problem is that it was designed to be played with 3 or more players. Playing Catan with two players, using any of the homebrew rules available on the web, is a less than overwhelming experience. This is the gap the card game fills – it can only be played two player, and its mechanics are oriented to making a fun, 2-player card game with a similar feel to the original board game while increasing the tactical diversity for two players.

Setup: The Catan Card Game has a more elaborate setup than most other card games I’ve played. First, you need to divide those 120 cards into 12 separate piles. Yes, 12. Fortunately, the backs of the cards tell you which pile each card should be in.

The first two piles are the red and blue player starting piles. One is handed to each player, who then constructs his or her starting setup. Each pile consists of 2 settlements, 1 special road section which also has abbreviated text describing the faces of the Event Die, and 6 region cards. These cards are arranged as follows:

R.R.R
.S~S.
R.R.R

Here, I have used S to indicate Settlement, the tilde (~) to indicate the road, R to indicate regions, and periods to indicate empty spaces which the player will fill in during the game.

From this starting setup, we learn a whole bunch about the game. First, in this card game you will be building a map of your territory (which the game calls your principality.) Like any map, the location of the various entities is of crucial importance to the game. Making a well-designed principality is a key factor to winning this game.

Second, notice the empty spaces above and below each settlement. These spaces can only be filled with green expansion cards. Each space can have one expansion card. Some expansion cards have the same effect no matter where they are placed (Knights, for example.) For others, placement is crucial – the Woolen Mill, for example, doubles the wool production of any Sheep region adjacent to it. This means that if it is placed below your settlement, only the two regions below and adjacent to the settlement could be affected by it.

It should be noted that once an expansion has been placed, it cannot be voluntarily moved, so placement strategy is important.

Later, you can build Cities on top of your Settlements. Cities do not automatically double resource production of adjacent regions, as they do in the board game. Rather, they increase the number of expansions you can build around that City from 2 to 4 (2 above, 2 below). Additionally, a city can be expanded with red expansion cards.

The final thing we can learn from this initial setup is the six kinds of region cards. Each kind of region produces a different resource – wool, wood, brick, ore, wheat and gold. Your starting cards contain 1 of each region. Additionally, each region card has a number, from 1 to 6, on it. This is the region’s production number, and comes into play when the Production Die is rolled. Your starting regions have 1 of each number from 1~6 on them. The only difference between the red and blue starting piles is which regions have which numbers on them.

(Gold is a new resource to the card game. Nothing ever gets build with gold – its only use is for trading and paying for a card search. However, there’s a red expansion card – the Mint – which allows you to trade gold at a 1:1 ratio for any other resource, which is very powerful. Also, there is no doubler card for Gold producing regions.)

Well, that’s a lot on how to setup up your principality, but we covered a lot of important details on the game play. But I still have 10 more card piles to describe!

Fortunately, 5 of them are composed of cards of the same type. You shuffle and then divide all the Development Cards into 5 roughly equal piles. These piles will never be reshuffled, and at times you can look through one of them. This adds a memory factor to the game. (Unfortunately for me - I have a crap memory.)

Three of the remaining piles are simply extra roads, settlements and cities, which a player takes from whenever he or she builds a new one of those. These cards are a hard limit, but except for the limit on settlements, these limits never come into play. There are only 5 settlements, though, so one player will likely get 3 while the other gets only 2 more during the course of the game. We’ll see how this is balanced, later.

(I should be more careful when I say these things. The very next game after I wrote the above paragraph, the limit on the number of cities that can be built became an important factor.)

The penultimate pile is for the Event Cards, which are shuffled and placed face down.

Finally, the remaining Region Cards are shuffled and placed face down.

After all these piles are created, which player plays first is determined by rolling off. Thereafter, each player takes one of the five Development Card piles, and looks through it (without changing the order of any of the cards) to fill up his or her initial hand with 3 development cards.

Victory: The game is over when one player has accumulated 12 Victory Points. Your initial Settlements grant you 1 Victory Point each, so you really only need 10 more to win. Victory Points are accumulated by building Settlements and Cities; by acquiring the Knight and Windmill tokens; and by building certain red development cards.

The Turn: On each of your turns, you will perform 4 actions, in order.

First, you will roll both the Event Die and Resource Die simultaneously. After the affects of the Event Die are carried out by both players, both players generate resources by rotating each region card with a number matching that rolled on the Resource Die 90 degrees. Each region has icons along its sides, from 0 icons to 3 icons. The side facing the controlling player indicates how many resources that region has produced. A region may never generate more than 3 resources at a time. When a resource is spent from a region, the region is rotated appropriately.

Next, the acting player may trade and build. Trading can be done “with the bank” at an exchange rate of 3 of any single resource type for 1 of any other resource type. Certain expansion cards improve this trading ratio for certain resource types. For example, the Brick Fleet allows you to trade 2 brick resources for any one other resource. Note that you must have the space to store the traded for resource in any region or regions. For example, if you have 3 ore resources in your sole ore producing region, you can’t trade for any more ore.

You can also trade with your opponent, although I have found this to be a rare thing to do except early in the game.

When you build, you can build a road, which must be placed adjacent to a Settlement or City; a Settlement, which must be placed adjacent to a Road; or a City, which is then placed on top of an existing Settlement.

Roads don’t do anything for you except allow you to build another Settlement. Roads cost 2 brick and 1 wood resource to build (a bit more pricey than in the board game.)

A Settlement is your juicy choice, as it provides you not only with two more expansion slots, but also an extra Victory Point and you get the top two Region cards, which you then place diagonally adjacent to your new Settlement. A Settlement costs 1 wheat, 1 brick, 1 wool, and 1 wood to build.

In addition to the extra expansion possibilities for building a City as noted above, building a City nets you 2 Victory Points instead of 1 for a Settlement (so if you had 7 Victory Points and upgraded a Settlement to a City, you would then have 8 Victory Points.) Cities cost 2 wheat and 3 ore to build.

So far, this isn’t very different from the Settlers board game. But the possibility of playing Development Cards to expand your Settlements and Cities makes the game richer for two players.

Green development cards (Settlement expansions) include Knights, which help you fight tournaments and win the Knight token; Fleets, which give you more favorable trading for a particular resource; Garrisons, which protect neighboring regions from the Bandits; Abbeys, which increase your hand size by 1; and resource doublers, which give the neighboring regions of the specified type double production when their number is rolled on the Production Die.

Later, you will be able to build red development cards onto your cities. These cards have a wider variety of functions, but many give you a victory point simply for building them, and are almost always more expensive.

After you trade and build stuff, you refill your hand to 3 cards (more if you have any Abbeys or Libraries built). You may do this either by simply drawing the top cards of off any of the Development Card stacks, or you can pay 2 resources of any type or types to look through one of the five stacks to take 1 card of your choice. You can pay the resource cost for each card you draw, if you want.

As your last action of your turn, you will hand the dice to your opponent, who then gets his or her turn.

Events and Action Cards: I glossed over the affects of the Event die above, and haven’t even mentioned Action Cards yet. Let me correct that now.

The Event Die has five icons on its six faces – a club for the Bandits, a sun for Year of Plenty, a helm for Tournament, a windmill for Commerce Advantage, and two red question marks which indicate that you must draw a card from the Event Deck.

All Catan games have the equivalent of a Robber from the board game, and the card game is no different. When the Bandit is rolled, each player immediately counts up the resources generated on all of his or her regions. If this totals more than 7, that player immediately looses all of his or her ore and wool resources. The Garrison expansion allows you to ignore the production of the adjacent regions when counting your resource total.

A Year of Plenty event allows both players to generate 1 resource at a region of their choice (not doubled by resource doublers).

A Tournament is like Year of Plenty, but only the player who controls more Tournament Points worth of knights gets to take a resource.

Commerce Advantage allows the player who controls the Windmill Token to steal one resource of his or her choice from his or her opponent.

The Event Cards are like extensions to the six faces of the die. They range from Productive Year, which causes each region bordering a Garrison to generate 1 resource, to Civil War, which forces one Knight or Fleet from each player’s principality back into their hands.

Action cards are yellow development cards. They have no resource cost, and can only be played when both players have 3 or more Victory Points. These action cards spice up the game. There are cards which can force your opponent to take a knight or building back into his or her hand. The Merchant card is used to force your opponent into a 1:2 trade with you. Caravans can shift your own resources around, allowing you to do 1:1 trades with yourself.

Possibly the most important action card is the Scout. This is the only action card that can be played before each player has 3 Victory Points. You play a Scout when you build a Settlement, and it allows you to choose the two regions you get for building that Settlement instead of choosing them randomly.

Knights: Knights are green Development Cards, and they take up an expansion slot when played. Each of the knights is different, both in build cost and in its two attributes. The two attributes are Strength and Tournament. The player with the most Strength at any point wins the Knight token and its associated victory point. Tournament is used only when the Event Die shows the Tournament icon; then, the player with the most Tournament points gets a resource of their choice.

Windmill Token: Certain expansion cards have one or more Windmill (a.k.a. Commerce) icons on them. To claim the Windmill Token and its associated Victory Point, you need to meet two requirements. First, you need to have a city built. Second, you need more Commerce icons than your opponent. The Windmill Token gives a Victory Point and allows you to steal a resource from your opponent when the Windmill Icon is rolled on the Event Die.

I’ll note that for both the Knight Token and Windmill token, the token becomes unclaimed if both players ever have the same number of Strength Points or Windmill Icons.

Strategy: The Settlers of Catan Card Game is filled with a variety of strategies especially designed for two players. First, there is the battle for the Knight and Windmill icons. Both of these tokens grant a Victory Point, and both grant special resource-accumulation powers based on the Event Die. Do you ignore these tokens and try to use your resources for something else (like acquiring the last Settlement), or do you try to wage a resource battle to keep the token from your opponent?

The most important strategy is looking through the development card stacks to choose a card. Your cards in hand have an important effect on the game, and form the basis of your strategy. But looking through the piles costs resources, resources that could go to expanding your principality.

Another important strategic note is that the game has a definite distinction between the early game and the late game. The early game is focused on increasing your resource production potential by building settlements, using scouts, and playing resource doublers. In the early game, red development cards are not needed at all, and certain action cards are less effective than they would be in the late game. The late game is devoted to acquiring Victory Points, and sees many Cities and red buildings being built.

One of the comments I have heard about this game is that the player who builds the last Settlement always wins. From my experience, there is no truth to this. In terms of resource production, building a Settlement is not your best option. The resource doubler cards, if played strategically, offer the best return on investment. A good strategy and a little luck can mean that even a player with a mean resource production in the late game can be beaten.

One last strategic note. There is a combination of cards that, when played, acts very much like a card combo in a CCG. You can force an opponent to take a building into her hand with an Arsonist Action Card, and then follow that up with a Spy Action Card, which allows you to steal a card from your opponents hand.

Balance: In general, the game is balanced well. There are many options, and none of them are bad. The trick is to balance your options into a strategy, and hope the dice don’t roll against you.

However, I have seen several games where one player got the shaft. This normally happens if the other player gets both the Knight and Windmill tokens early, or simply gets good rolls and gets to a fourth settlement before the other player gets his or her third one out.

Because the game can last more than an hour, it can be very frustrating for the person getting the shaft.

Conclusion: This is not a casual game by any means. It takes a while to set up, and requires a great deal of mental energy to keep track of everything going on. In this way, it is even more complex than the Settlers of Catan board game, which has fewer variables to keep track of.

Still, for those who love the Catan games, and have an equally obsessed partner they can play with, the Settlers of Catan Card Game provides many hours of (occasionally frustrating) intense game play.

Settlers of Catan Card Game
Settlers of Catan Card Game Playtest Review by Jake Baker on 26/08/02 Style: 3 (Average) Substance: 5 (Excellent!) An excellent card game of strategy for two players. Product: Settlers of Catan Card Game Author: Klaus Teuber Category: Card Game Company/Publisher: Kosmos and Mayfair Games, Inc. Line: Settlers of Catan Cost: $20 Page count: n/a Year published: 1996 ISBN: SKU: MFG0485 Comp copy?: no Playtest Review by Jake Baker on 26/08/02 Genre tags:	Settlers of Catan Card Game What you get: For $20, you get 120 cards of varying sorts, 2 wooden tokens, 2 wooden dice, a rulebook, and a plastic holder for all the components. The production value of all of the components is solid and sports the standard understated quality of Catanian art. Why you need it: Settlers of Catan is a great board game of building and trading. The unfortunate problem is that it was designed to be played with 3 or more players. Playing Catan with two players, using any of the homebrew rules available on the web, is a less than overwhelming experience. This is the gap the card game fills – it can only be played two player, and its mechanics are oriented to making a fun, 2-player card game with a similar feel to the original board game while increasing the tactical diversity for two players. Setup: The Catan Card Game has a more elaborate setup than most other card games I’ve played. First, you need to divide those 120 cards into 12 separate piles. Yes, 12. Fortunately, the backs of the cards tell you which pile each card should be in. The first two piles are the red and blue player starting piles. One is handed to each player, who then constructs his or her starting setup. Each pile consists of 2 settlements, 1 special road section which also has abbreviated text describing the faces of the Event Die, and 6 region cards. These cards are arranged as follows: R.R.R .S~S. R.R.R Here, I have used S to indicate Settlement, the tilde (~) to indicate the road, R to indicate regions, and periods to indicate empty spaces which the player will fill in during the game. From this starting setup, we learn a whole bunch about the game. First, in this card game you will be building a map of your territory (which the game calls your principality.) Like any map, the location of the various entities is of crucial importance to the game. Making a well-designed principality is a key factor to winning this game. Second, notice the empty spaces above and below each settlement. These spaces can only be filled with green expansion cards. Each space can have one expansion card. Some expansion cards have the same effect no matter where they are placed (Knights, for example.) For others, placement is crucial – the Woolen Mill, for example, doubles the wool production of any Sheep region adjacent to it. This means that if it is placed below your settlement, only the two regions below and adjacent to the settlement could be affected by it. It should be noted that once an expansion has been placed, it cannot be voluntarily moved, so placement strategy is important. Later, you can build Cities on top of your Settlements. Cities do not automatically double resource production of adjacent regions, as they do in the board game. Rather, they increase the number of expansions you can build around that City from 2 to 4 (2 above, 2 below). Additionally, a city can be expanded with red expansion cards. The final thing we can learn from this initial setup is the six kinds of region cards. Each kind of region produces a different resource – wool, wood, brick, ore, wheat and gold. Your starting cards contain 1 of each region. Additionally, each region card has a number, from 1 to 6, on it. This is the region’s production number, and comes into play when the Production Die is rolled. Your starting regions have 1 of each number from 1~6 on them. The only difference between the red and blue starting piles is which regions have which numbers on them. (Gold is a new resource to the card game. Nothing ever gets build with gold – its only use is for trading and paying for a card search. However, there’s a red expansion card – the Mint – which allows you to trade gold at a 1:1 ratio for any other resource, which is very powerful. Also, there is no doubler card for Gold producing regions.) Well, that’s a lot on how to setup up your principality, but we covered a lot of important details on the game play. But I still have 10 more card piles to describe! Fortunately, 5 of them are composed of cards of the same type. You shuffle and then divide all the Development Cards into 5 roughly equal piles. These piles will never be reshuffled, and at times you can look through one of them. This adds a memory factor to the game. (Unfortunately for me - I have a crap memory.) Three of the remaining piles are simply extra roads, settlements and cities, which a player takes from whenever he or she builds a new one of those. These cards are a hard limit, but except for the limit on settlements, these limits never come into play. There are only 5 settlements, though, so one player will likely get 3 while the other gets only 2 more during the course of the game. We’ll see how this is balanced, later. (I should be more careful when I say these things. The very next game after I wrote the above paragraph, the limit on the number of cities that can be built became an important factor.) The penultimate pile is for the Event Cards, which are shuffled and placed face down. Finally, the remaining Region Cards are shuffled and placed face down. After all these piles are created, which player plays first is determined by rolling off. Thereafter, each player takes one of the five Development Card piles, and looks through it (without changing the order of any of the cards) to fill up his or her initial hand with 3 development cards. Victory: The game is over when one player has accumulated 12 Victory Points. Your initial Settlements grant you 1 Victory Point each, so you really only need 10 more to win. Victory Points are accumulated by building Settlements and Cities; by acquiring the Knight and Windmill tokens; and by building certain red development cards. The Turn: On each of your turns, you will perform 4 actions, in order. First, you will roll both the Event Die and Resource Die simultaneously. After the affects of the Event Die are carried out by both players, both players generate resources by rotating each region card with a number matching that rolled on the Resource Die 90 degrees. Each region has icons along its sides, from 0 icons to 3 icons. The side facing the controlling player indicates how many resources that region has produced. A region may never generate more than 3 resources at a time. When a resource is spent from a region, the region is rotated appropriately. Next, the acting player may trade and build. Trading can be done “with the bank” at an exchange rate of 3 of any single resource type for 1 of any other resource type. Certain expansion cards improve this trading ratio for certain resource types. For example, the Brick Fleet allows you to trade 2 brick resources for any one other resource. Note that you must have the space to store the traded for resource in any region or regions. For example, if you have 3 ore resources in your sole ore producing region, you can’t trade for any more ore. You can also trade with your opponent, although I have found this to be a rare thing to do except early in the game. When you build, you can build a road, which must be placed adjacent to a Settlement or City; a Settlement, which must be placed adjacent to a Road; or a City, which is then placed on top of an existing Settlement. Roads don’t do anything for you except allow you to build another Settlement. Roads cost 2 brick and 1 wood resource to build (a bit more pricey than in the board game.) A Settlement is your juicy choice, as it provides you not only with two more expansion slots, but also an extra Victory Point and you get the top two Region cards, which you then place diagonally adjacent to your new Settlement. A Settlement costs 1 wheat, 1 brick, 1 wool, and 1 wood to build. In addition to the extra expansion possibilities for building a City as noted above, building a City nets you 2 Victory Points instead of 1 for a Settlement (so if you had 7 Victory Points and upgraded a Settlement to a City, you would then have 8 Victory Points.) Cities cost 2 wheat and 3 ore to build. So far, this isn’t very different from the Settlers board game. But the possibility of playing Development Cards to expand your Settlements and Cities makes the game richer for two players. Green development cards (Settlement expansions) include Knights, which help you fight tournaments and win the Knight token; Fleets, which give you more favorable trading for a particular resource; Garrisons, which protect neighboring regions from the Bandits; Abbeys, which increase your hand size by 1; and resource doublers, which give the neighboring regions of the specified type double production when their number is rolled on the Production Die. Later, you will be able to build red development cards onto your cities. These cards have a wider variety of functions, but many give you a victory point simply for building them, and are almost always more expensive. After you trade and build stuff, you refill your hand to 3 cards (more if you have any Abbeys or Libraries built). You may do this either by simply drawing the top cards of off any of the Development Card stacks, or you can pay 2 resources of any type or types to look through one of the five stacks to take 1 card of your choice. You can pay the resource cost for each card you draw, if you want. As your last action of your turn, you will hand the dice to your opponent, who then gets his or her turn. Events and Action Cards: I glossed over the affects of the Event die above, and haven’t even mentioned Action Cards yet. Let me correct that now. The Event Die has five icons on its six faces – a club for the Bandits, a sun for Year of Plenty, a helm for Tournament, a windmill for Commerce Advantage, and two red question marks which indicate that you must draw a card from the Event Deck. All Catan games have the equivalent of a Robber from the board game, and the card game is no different. When the Bandit is rolled, each player immediately counts up the resources generated on all of his or her regions. If this totals more than 7, that player immediately looses all of his or her ore and wool resources. The Garrison expansion allows you to ignore the production of the adjacent regions when counting your resource total. A Year of Plenty event allows both players to generate 1 resource at a region of their choice (not doubled by resource doublers). A Tournament is like Year of Plenty, but only the player who controls more Tournament Points worth of knights gets to take a resource. Commerce Advantage allows the player who controls the Windmill Token to steal one resource of his or her choice from his or her opponent. The Event Cards are like extensions to the six faces of the die. They range from Productive Year, which causes each region bordering a Garrison to generate 1 resource, to Civil War, which forces one Knight or Fleet from each player’s principality back into their hands. Action cards are yellow development cards. They have no resource cost, and can only be played when both players have 3 or more Victory Points. These action cards spice up the game. There are cards which can force your opponent to take a knight or building back into his or her hand. The Merchant card is used to force your opponent into a 1:2 trade with you. Caravans can shift your own resources around, allowing you to do 1:1 trades with yourself. Possibly the most important action card is the Scout. This is the only action card that can be played before each player has 3 Victory Points. You play a Scout when you build a Settlement, and it allows you to choose the two regions you get for building that Settlement instead of choosing them randomly. Knights: Knights are green Development Cards, and they take up an expansion slot when played. Each of the knights is different, both in build cost and in its two attributes. The two attributes are Strength and Tournament. The player with the most Strength at any point wins the Knight token and its associated victory point. Tournament is used only when the Event Die shows the Tournament icon; then, the player with the most Tournament points gets a resource of their choice. Windmill Token: Certain expansion cards have one or more Windmill (a.k.a. Commerce) icons on them. To claim the Windmill Token and its associated Victory Point, you need to meet two requirements. First, you need to have a city built. Second, you need more Commerce icons than your opponent. The Windmill Token gives a Victory Point and allows you to steal a resource from your opponent when the Windmill Icon is rolled on the Event Die. I’ll note that for both the Knight Token and Windmill token, the token becomes unclaimed if both players ever have the same number of Strength Points or Windmill Icons. Strategy: The Settlers of Catan Card Game is filled with a variety of strategies especially designed for two players. First, there is the battle for the Knight and Windmill icons. Both of these tokens grant a Victory Point, and both grant special resource-accumulation powers based on the Event Die. Do you ignore these tokens and try to use your resources for something else (like acquiring the last Settlement), or do you try to wage a resource battle to keep the token from your opponent? The most important strategy is looking through the development card stacks to choose a card. Your cards in hand have an important effect on the game, and form the basis of your strategy. But looking through the piles costs resources, resources that could go to expanding your principality. Another important strategic note is that the game has a definite distinction between the early game and the late game. The early game is focused on increasing your resource production potential by building settlements, using scouts, and playing resource doublers. In the early game, red development cards are not needed at all, and certain action cards are less effective than they would be in the late game. The late game is devoted to acquiring Victory Points, and sees many Cities and red buildings being built. One of the comments I have heard about this game is that the player who builds the last Settlement always wins. From my experience, there is no truth to this. In terms of resource production, building a Settlement is not your best option. The resource doubler cards, if played strategically, offer the best return on investment. A good strategy and a little luck can mean that even a player with a mean resource production in the late game can be beaten. One last strategic note. There is a combination of cards that, when played, acts very much like a card combo in a CCG. You can force an opponent to take a building into her hand with an Arsonist Action Card, and then follow that up with a Spy Action Card, which allows you to steal a card from your opponents hand. Balance: In general, the game is balanced well. There are many options, and none of them are bad. The trick is to balance your options into a strategy, and hope the dice don’t roll against you. However, I have seen several games where one player got the shaft. This normally happens if the other player gets both the Knight and Windmill tokens early, or simply gets good rolls and gets to a fourth settlement before the other player gets his or her third one out. Because the game can last more than an hour, it can be very frustrating for the person getting the shaft. Conclusion: This is not a casual game by any means. It takes a while to set up, and requires a great deal of mental energy to keep track of everything going on. In this way, it is even more complex than the Settlers of Catan board game, which has fewer variables to keep track of. Still, for those who love the Catan games, and have an equally obsessed partner they can play with, the Settlers of Catan Card Game provides many hours of (occasionally frustrating) intense game play.