Players: 3-4
Playing Time: 1-2 hours
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)

The Components

The success or failure of a travel edition such as this ultimately depends upon the quality of the components--and their utility while on the road--and thus the majority of this review looks into that aspect of the game.

Here's what the travel edition comes with:

• the board
  • 1 game board
  • 19 terrain tiles
  • 9 harbors
• playing pieces
  • 16 cities
  • 20 settlements
  • 60 roads
  • 1 robber
• cards
  • 95 resource cards
  • 25 development cards
• cardboard references
  • 4 building cost cards
  • 2 victory point cards
• 2 dice
• 1 rulebook

Board: The core of the travel edition's special design is in the game board. This hard, sturdy plastic board, about eight inches on a side, is essentially a tray to hold all the pieces that make up a Catan game. There are 19 hexagonal slots, each intended to hold a terrain tile; a raised number in the middle marks the random number for the terrain and also helps keep the terrains in place. 9 triangle slots along the edges of the board likewise hold the harbors. Finally, there are three circular holes along each hexside, which as we'll see fit the pegs of the playing pieces.

The terrain tiles are hexagonal pieces with circular holes in the middle. They're printed on light cardboard. Each is pretty small and doesn't show a lot of detail, but the color is really enough to identify the terrain type. The harbors are even tinier, but each does show, in miniature, the type of trades you can do at that harbor (though they're so small that they're a little hard to read).

The Settlers board does a good job of meeting a travel edition's first requirement: it keeps all the pieces in place while you're playing, which is particularly important for a game that's usually pretty loose with its pieces, like Catan. All the tile slots in the board are quite deep, and thus I can't foresee any problem with tiles bouncing out. Because everything is small, the pieces are really no frills (other than the very sturdy board), but that seems fine given that the important factor here was portability.

There are two minor downsides to the board: first, the desert tile only fits in the middle, which slightly constrains the variability of games; and second, you have to flip the board upside down to remove the tiles, which can be a mild pain during travel (though the can flip it into the top of the box if you need to).

Playing Pieces: There are three types of playing pieces (roads, cities, and settlements) in four player colors (red, blue, white, orange). Each piece is a small and simple design in hard plastic, with a peg in the bottom which will keep it stable on the board. The road is just a rectangular cube, the settlement is a cube with a triangular roof, and the city is an "ell" with a triangular roof. In the box, the differences are a tad difficult to make out, but once you get them onto the board, everything is pretty clear (especially since roads peg into different places than cities or settlements, and thus their purpose is clear from their location).

Again, as with the board, these pieces are graphically "no frills", but solid work has been done to ensure that they'll stay stable even when in a moving vehicle.

The robber is just a tiny plastic pawn. Disappointingly, there's nothing to keep it in place--but it probably won't move beyond the recessed terrain tile slot unless you're very heavily jostled.

Cards: The cards are all printed in a miniature size on thin, but firm, cardstock with rounded corners.

The resource cards show the terrain type and the resource produced, just like the normal Settlers' resource cards, and thus have all the easy-to-use benefits that Settlers usually accrues due to its clear iconography.

The development cards have small but readable text explaining what the card does, and still manage to fit in artwork.

Cardboard References: These cards are printed on thick, sturdy cardboard in full color.

The building cost cards show what resources it takes to build which playing pieces, and also identifies related victory points. Some of the resource artwork is a bit fuzzy, but the iconography remains clear; like in the regular Settlers game, this reference really holds the game together.

The victory point cards exhaustively list the rules related to the victory point (largest army or longest trade route) and note the value (2 victory points). There's a bit of artwork here too.

Dice: Nothing special here. Little plastic dice, white with black pips. They seem well manufactured.

Rules: The 14-page rulebook is divided into a short introduction, the rules, and the almanac. It's well laid out, full of examples, and has good pictures too. The rules explain the game well, and the alamanc makes for good in-game reference.

Box & Tray: The box is 8 inches on a side and a couple of inches thick, which definitely makes the game small enough for travel.

The tray is another place where the game really succeeds.Each type of card (the 5 resources and the development cards) has an individual slot in the tray. There's also a little "finger space" to the side of each slot which lets you easily pull out one or more cards.

There are likewise slots for each of the four player colors. Puling the pieces out is a bit more of a pain than the cards, because they're so tiny, but it's still doable.

The final, central slot contains the dice, reference cards, and all those board pieces that you're going to take out during setup. (Afterward, you can use this slot to roll your dice in, if you want.)

The end result is that the tray can be used as a "bank" during the game, with everything in its space, and each fairly easy to pull out during the game. This is yet another thing that makes the game very usable during travel when you don't want to have everything spread out.

Overall, The Settlers of Catan Travel Edition is a superb example of how to make a travel edition. It doesn't just shrink all the pieces, but also creates a design which can be used in very tight spaces, and in moving vehicles that might not be entirely stable. I usually reserve a perfect Style score for games that are highly utilitarian, high quality, and very beautiful. This Travel Edition definitely doesn't match the last criteria. Nonetheless, I've decided to give it a "5" out of "5" for Style because it's just not possible to make a travel game much better than this.

The Game Design

I've decided to utterly skip a discussion of how the Travel edition plays. Because, it plays exactly like parent game The Settlers of Catan. If you want more information, go read my original review's Game Play & Game Design sections.

Suffice to say, Settlers is a very good light strategy game that has remained very popular over nearly a decade of play. If I have one disappointment with this Travel Edition, it's that no rules for 2-player play were included, even though such can be found on the net and in certain licensed Settlers games. Rules for two players would have allowed couples to take this game on the road.

Nonetheless, the Travel Edition deserves the same Substance rating as its predecessor, which is "4" out of "5".

Conclusion

If you enjoy The Settlers of Catan, and want to be able to play in cars, on trains, on airplanes, and in cabins out in the middle of the wilderness, this is an excellent product for you. Enough said.

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