Players: 3-4
Playing Time: 2 hours
The Components
As is typical for recent Catan games, this one comes with a box full of well-developed and beautiful components.
Game Board: A huge six-panel board is the center of the game. It lays out the United States of America in Catan-like hexes. There's also a fair amount of other detail on the map, including set locations for cities, good-storage turntables, and even the build cost info printed straight on the board.
The board is quite attractive and well-produced. It's also (in the Catan style) the first component in a well-thought out series of pieces which cleanly link the hexes to the goods they produce, and the things you can buy with them.
Building Costs: Each player receives a handy building cost card which shows everything that he can build, plus movement costs, each defined as a set of 1-3 resources. This is pretty typical, again, for Catan, but is attractively rendered here.
Of course, you may not even need these, as you have copies of them on the board too.
Other Cardboard Bits: Coins come in cardboard discs of two sizes, for ones and fives.
Some of the resource production spaces on the board have variable resource production numbers. Very thick cardboard numbers are used to mark these values.
Wooden Bits: There are a large number of wooden player bits in red, white, blue, and orange (amber?). This includes 30 rails, 12 cities, 5 trains, 2 settlers, and 10 goods in each of the player colors. They're all well-produced wood bits with the trains and wagon-like settlers being particularly cute.
There's also a gray robber (outlaw) token.
Cards: 95 resource cards and 24 development cards. They're all printed on untextured light-to-medium weight cards. The art on the cards is quite attractive. There are also some icons on the development cards which will help you to quickly assess what they do.
Dice: Red and blue dice with white pips. Very patriotic.
Rulebook: A 16-page rulebook, beautifully printed in four colors. About half the books contains rules and about half is an almanac providing the historic details behind the various game elements.
Overall Settlers of America is beautifully produced with top-quality components and with the great ease of usability that you'd expect of a Catan game. It earns a full "5" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
Settlers of America is a new historical game based on Settlers of Catan. In this review, I'm going to assume that you're already familiar with the basics of the Catan system, and thus I'm going to skim some of the stuff about how resource production works. If you don't know what I'm talking bout, read my Settlers review.
In this game, the object is to build all of your cities, thereby freeing up all of your goods, and to then deliver all of those goods by rail to cities owned by other players.
Setup: Settlers of America comes with a set board displaying the United States. All of the hexes are set and most of the resource production numbers are also set, but some of the eastern hexes instead have blank production number spaces. 12 tokens, numbered 9-11, will be randomly assigned to those spaces.
Each player gets three cities, one rail, and one train to place on the board. Cities must go on specific "empty city sites". Rails go adjacent to cities, and the train goes on your rail.
Remaining cities are put on a little turntable for each player. Each city has a good attached to it: when the city is built, the good is freed for delivery. Each player also gets one good already available for delivery at the start of the game.
Each player also gets 3 gold at start.
Finally, each player gets up to three resource cards, based on the placement of his final city.
Order of Play: Each player's turn is broken into three phases:
- Production Phase
- Action Phase
- Extraordinary Build Phase
The resources are slightly different than the original Catan game.They include: lumber, ore, grain, coal, and cattle, but that's mainly a thematic difference.
Gold Compensation. Whenever you earn no resources from a roll, you collect 1 gold instead.
Action Phase: There are a number of actions that you can take as part of the main phase of your turn.
Trade. You can trade with your opponents or you can trade identical resources with the bank at a 3:1 ratio. You can also turn in 2 gold for 1 of any resource, but only twice per turn.
Buy Development Cards & Build. There are four items you can buy:
- Development Card. Give you various bonuses and special powers during play. There are no VP cards like there are in regular Catan, nor any largest army (though a "Cavalry" card lets you move the outlaw around).
- Settlers. Settlers are the engine upon which new cities will be built. You can build one at any of your existing cities.
- Train. Trains help you deliver goods. You can build them on any of your rails adjacent to one of your cities.
- Rail. Rails give you ways to move your train to new cities for good delivery. You can build them adjacent to your rails or cities. You also get a special bonus when you build rails: when you connect up a previously unconnected city to one or more cities in a network, you earn gold.
Move Settler. In order to build a new city, you must build a settler and move him to a new empty city-site. Moving a Settler just costs 1 grain for every 1-3 spaces of movement, which occur from hex corner to hex corner. When you end the settler's movement on an empty city-site he turns into a city ... and one of your goods is freed for delivery too.
As settlements appear in the west, those variable resource numbers start coming off the board, which makes the east less vauable, and forces you to go west even more.
Play Development Cards. On a turn you can play one development card you did not buy that turn.
Move Train & Deliver Goods. You can move train 1-3 spaces along track by spending 1 coal. You don't have to stick to your own track; you can pay 1 gold to use another player's track for the turn. If you move adjacent to a built city belonging to another player that hasn't received a good, you can deliver any good that's been freed up. (You don't actually "load" goods, you just deliver then from your turntable via a slightly abstract procedure.)
Extraordinary Build Phase: After a player's turn, each other player gets the opportunity to build. Then play continues on with the next player.
Winning the Game: The first player to build all his cities, thereby free all his goods, and deliver them all, wins the game.
Relationships to Other Games
The Settlers of Catan has received many expansions, supplements, revisions, recastings, and imitations. Among them is a series of "Catan Histories", the other two of which are Settlers of the Stone Age and Struggle for Rome.
Like those other historic games, Settlers of America takes the basic Catan systems, places them on a set map, then adds a layer of additional rules: here, regarding trains and delivery. Like those other games, Settlers of America also tends to last about two hours, almost twice the length of the original game.
The Game Design
The Settlers of America is a well-designed game that adeptly combines the gameplay of Catan's resource-management with the delivery mechanisms of a rail game.
The resource-management mechanisms work quite a bit like a normal Catan game. I find the way the number chits move west to be very clever, because it creates the whole westward-expansion of the US almost effortlessly. The gold-for-no production was also a nice way to offset luck.
However, I also feel like the game loses something through the vast number of cities you build over the course of the game. More than almost any other Catan I've played, it felt like the resource numbers didn't matter. No one made an effort to either spread out their luck or concentrate it. The numbers just felt irrelevent. This was probably worsened by the fact that you could so easily trade gold for missing resources.
Nonetheless, the Catan resource-management is a solid base to start from.
The rail game mechanism works considerably more like a train game than I expected. You might build a complete rail network or you might build rail segments coming out from your various cities and connecting up to other networks. You will definitely be thinking about how to deliver your various goods, as it's how you actually win the game.
If I have any complaint about the game, it's that it feels to me like it runs long--but I've generally thought this about each of the three historic Catan games. You'll probably already know whether a 2-hour Catan-like game is your cup of tea or not. If it is, this one has some good mechanics and is sufficiently varied from the original that it'll feel like a very familiar, yet new game.
On sum I've given Settlers of America a high "4" out of "5" for Substance.
Conclusion
Would you like some pickup-and-delivery with your Catan game? If so, Settlers of America is the game for you, as it adroitly combines resource-management and railroad-building into a hybrid that works effortlessly. It's a bit long, but if you don't mind a 2-hour Catan game, it's a good choice.
