The Settlers of Catan Card Game is, for the most part, a card game in a fancy box. Here's the pieces that come with it:

• 120 cards
• 1 Production Die
• 1 Event Die
• 1 Knight Token
• 1 Windmill Token
• 1 Rulebook
• 1 Box w/Tray

The cards are square with rounded corners, of a reasonable thickness. There are a number of different types of cards (setup, development, expansion, event), but they're relatively easy to tell apart via clear pictures on the back. The event and expansion cards tend to have decent, though small, pictures with descriptive text under them. The setup and development cards all feature somewhat crude 3D modelling pictures that I don't find appealing. All the cards make good use of icons to help clarify the game. You have icons for the six resources, for victory points, for commerce points, and for a couple of knight statistics. It's all intuitive and improves the gameplay.

The rest of the main components are wood, all nicely manufactured.

There are two dice. The "production" die is a simple six-sider, numbered "*" to "*******". The event die is a six-sided die with a different colored icon on each face. Again, the icons are clear and intuitive.

The knight and windmill tokens are each beautiful. They each feature a gold-stamped pictured on a solid wood block; they're used to denote bonus victory points (1 each).

The rulebook is 32 pages in black and white with a color cardstock cover. It's adequate, though I found it somewhat hard to follow in places (possibly a result of the innate complexity of the game). Half of the book is made up of an "almanac", describing and explaining all the cards, which is very useful.

The box is very solid, and includes a tray for holding the pieces. Unfortunately, the tray doesn't work that well. One of the slots intended for holding cards actually tends to spill them all over, which is annoying.

It's clear that the producers of this Settlers card game were trying to pull the high quality design of the board game over to this new medium. They at least partially succeed. However, due to the computer generated art on some of the cards, I only give it "4" out of "5" for style, rather than a perfect score. Still, above average.

The Settlers of Catan Card Game starts off with a setup that I'd have to call complex. I had to read it twice, then muddle through actually placing down all the cards before I figured out exactly what was meant. It's a bit better on return visits, but still time consuming.

Setup: Each player has a deck of 9 cards. These include: 2 settlements, 1 road, and 6 Regions. Each settlement is a little village, and the road goes between the two of them. Regions are then placed diagonally adjacent to each settlement (e.g., at the four corners). See the nearby picture. The road is in the middle, between two settlements, with the six Regions surrounding them.

(Each Region card, it's important to note, produces one of six resources: grain, ore, wool, timber, brick, or gold. There's also a die number on each of the Regions, "1" to "6", which noes when the resource is produced. Finally, the four sides of the region card are marked "0" to "3" so that you can rotate it to show how many resources of the type are currently being held in that Region.)

After each player has laid out his little civilization the rest of the cards are divided into 10(!) piles. Development cards are sorted by type: road, city, settlement, and region. Event cards are placed in a fifth pile. The expansion deck is then shuffled and divided into 5 different piles.

Finally, each player gets to look through one of the 5 expansion decks, and choose 3 cards for his starting hand.

Once you've gotten all that setup out of the way, you can now begin the actual game, which is broken into the following phases:

• 1. Roll Dice
• 2. Take Actions
• 3. End Turn
• X. Play Actions

Roll Dice: There are two dice in this game: the production die and the event die. The event die takes place first. It shows one of five different icons:

• Knight / Tournament: Each player totals his knight's tournament points; the winner gets a resource of his choice.
• Windmill / Commerce: The player with the Windmill token (most commerce) takes one resource from his opponent.
• Club / Brigand: Any player with more than 7 ungarrisoned resources loses all ore and wool.
• Sun / Year of Plenty: Each player gains one resource of his choice.
• Question / Event: The top card from the event deck is played .

The production die, as previously noted, reveals a number from "1" to "6". Each region with that number than produces its resource, causing the player to rotate the card to show he has one more resource ... unless the region already is at the 3-resource maximum.

Take Actions: This is the main phase of the game, and you can do a couple of different things. First, you can trade ... offering up some of your resources for some of your opponent's resources. Sadly, this being a 2-player game, trading isn't very important. If your opponents wins, you lose, and vice-versa, so it's too close to a zero sum game for trading to ever be that important. You can always trade to the bank for a 3:1 ratio (and this tends to be what's done with the gold, since it has no other purpose in the game).

Second, you can develop by buying a few standard cards "from the bank" and expanding your little empire:

Road: 2 bricks, 1 timber
Settlement: 1 timber, 1 wool, 1 brick, 1 grain
City: 3 ore, 2 grain

You build roads because they must be used to separate settlements. You build settlements because that allows you to draw and place two new region cards, which provide resource production; they also allow the placement of up to two green expansion cards; and are also worth one 1 Vicotry Point each. You build cities by upgrading settlements. They're worth 2 VPs, and allow you to place up to four green or red expansion cards (up from the previous limit of two green).

Of note is the fact that settlement and city cards are both limited. There are 5 settlements and 7 cities. This deliberate inequity, which ensures that the players won't have equal numbers of cities or settlements, allows for strategy.

Finally, you can expand your city. This is done through green and red expansion cards, which make up the majority of those expansion decks you've already met. (The action cards are also in this deck, but we haven't gotten to them yet). You'll have three expansion cards in your hand at the start of most turns. As noted you can play up to 2 green expansion cards on settlements and up to 4 green or red expansion cards on cities. They go above and below the city, filling in those spaces between the region cards. Expansion cards also have costs to play: those wool, bricks, grain, ore, and timber that we've already met in various amounts.

As you might expect red/city expansion cards are often better than green/settlement expansion cards. They're also more expensive to play, in resources. The most common cards either increase production of adjacent regions or allow for better trading ratios (e.g., 2:1) for some resources. A number provide victory points. There are garrisons which help protect against brigands and any number of cards with windmill symbols on them which give commerce points, which decide who gets the Windmill token. There also knights who have two different values, one which marks knight values, which determines ownership of the Knight tokens, and the other of which totals tournament points, which is used for the tournament event.

End Turn: At the end of your turn you replenish your Expansion deck cards to 3. You can do this by either drawing from an expansion pile or paying two resources to select from an expansion pile. If you didn't play anything you may instead exchange a card.

Play Actions: At any appropriate time during your turn you may also play yellow action cards (which are also drawn out of the expansion deck). These can affect production, destroy some of an opponent's cards, protect your own cards, steal resources, affect trade, etc. There are only 10 different action cards total.

Winning the Game: When someone reaches 12 Victory Points they win. This is achieved through:

Settlements: 1 VP ea.
Cities: 2 VP ea.
Windmill Token: 1 VP
Knight Token: 1 VP
Certain Expansions: 1+ VP

The game design of the Catan Card Game is, at the least, interesting. It remains very true to the original Settlers of Catan board game, but at the same time translates very well to a card medium.

Here's some of the good points:

Great Card Mechanism: The use of cards to build an environment is not exactly innovative, but it's fairly rare. This game makes very good use of it by delineating specific locations for a wide variety of different types of cards. It all makes sense and is easy to remember when you play (with the possible exception of the city/red-card restriction). However, it does take a fairly large playing surface, as the picture above shows.

Multiple Paths to Victory: The game makes interesting use of the "multiple paths to victory" philosophy. You can try and push forward on cities, settlements, knights, or commerce to win, and can cede any of those victory paths to the other player and still have a chance to emerge the winner.

Very Good Randomization Control: A number of recent games try and control randomization by allowing you to select cards from a large set, thus maintaining some randomness, but at the same time allowing some choice. The Catan card game improves on most of those other designs in two ways. First, you choose whether to pay to have this improved control or not; sometimes it'll matter and sometimes not. Second, when you see a set of cards, it's a preexisting set (one of the five expansion piles) which you've probably seen before. This can help reduce look-up/decision time.

The game also has its flaws:

Bad Interaction: This is the biggest problem, and I think a real killer for a 2-player game: there is very minimal interaction between the two players. Outside of event cards and the infrequently used trade option (see below), each player is steadily working on their own civilization. It feels a bit like two simultaneous games of Solitaire.

Bad Trading: As already noted, trading is heavily restricted in this game. In a multiplayer trading game, players are willing to trade, even if they give another player an advantage, because it's not a direct win-lose situation because of the number of people in the game. In a 2-player game like the Settlers Card Game there is considerably more discouragement, because you're directly helping out your one and only opponent. In the couple of Settlers card games I've played there was little trading, and mostly out of a sense of good will rather than serious gamesmanship.

Some Memorization Required: There's a bit of a "Concentration" aspect to looking at the piles of expansion cards, but that's somewhat resolved by the fact that you can go back and look at those piles just by paying a couple of resources, which is cheap in the end game.

Poor Expandibility: A minor gripe--the manufacturers could easily have expanded this out to a four-player game by producing two alternative versions of the core game, with different setups for each player. Alas, the two-player European card game mentality seems too deeply ingrained.

Overall, I don't think the Settlers card game stands up to the gameplay of its predecessor, the board game, in either fun or replayability, but it's still a very solid design. I'd thus rate it average, "3" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

If you can never get three or more players together for Settlers of Catan, this 2-player Card Game is a very solid alternative. It pulls over all the core Settlers ideas, but adapts them in an original and appropriate way for the card game medium.