Players: 3-4
Playing Time: 2-3 hours
Difficulty: 5 (of 10)
The Starfarers of Catan is a Catan-mechanic game, meaning that it uses many of the same concepts of resource production and resource usage as the original The Settlers of Catan, but otherwise may vary widely from the original with new game systems. Starfarers is a totally standalone game that doesn't require the original Settlers game in any way. As with the rest of the Catan family, it was originally printed in Germany by Kosmos.
This is a revision/expansion of a review I wrote in November, 2002.
The Components
Starfarers of Catan comes with a very large set of components, including:
- 1 game board
- 4 mother ships
- Expansion pieces for mother ships:
- 24 cannons
- 24 boosters
- 20 freight rings
- 40 fame rings
- Player game pieces in 4 colors
- colonies
- trading outposts
- spaceport rings
- transporters
- victory point marker
- 100 resource cards
- 20 friendship cards
- 32 encounter cards
- 38 resource chits
- 4 friendship chips
- 4 game overview cards
- 2 dice
- 1 rulebook
- 1 almanac
Whew.
Game Board: The gameboard shows a fairly plain starfield. At one side are the clusters of close-Earth colonies, while scattered about the rest of the board are three-planet clusters intended for exploration and colonization. Also depicted are the trading outposts of four alien races. A victory point track makes it easy to keep track of who's winning, something I wish all the Catan games had, while other boxes on the board list victory conditions. Overall the standard eye for ease of use that can be found throughout the Catan family is here. The board itself is made out of solid, textured cardboard which appears to be somewhat water resistant.
Mother Ships & Expansions: The ships and expansions (as well as the soon to be described player pieces) are all made out of plastic, which will probably come as a shock to the die-hard Settlers player. Wood vs. plastic is always a trade-off; the one feels more natural while the other allows for much finer sculpting. Given the genre of this game and the huge number of pieces, it's pretty obvious why plastic was used. (When I first reviewed this game, I had a very negative reaction to the plastic, but that's since been tempered as more European games have come out featuring plastic pieces, including the newest German version of Settlers of Catan).
The mother ship itself is a sort of scoreboard that you use to keep track of the various technological advances you've made. It also marks your color and is your individual randomizer. Personally, I find it silly, and would have preferred a cardboard technology display and the accompanying lower price point. Unfortunately the mother ships aren't made of the best material. The glue is weak, and so one of our ships flew apart when it was "rolled". In addition the clips used to hold the boosters are small and brittle. A couple had broken off after just a few games of normal usage (and according to other Internet comments, this has been a common issue).
The four "expansion piece" components all clip onto the mother ship in various ways. Cannons set in the top, fame rings slide down the ship's prow, freight rings latch onto the side, and boosters clip on the bottom. They're each monotone, but nicely sculpted. The boosters and cannons are made of a soft plastic which looks much more durable than the hard plastic the rest of the pieces are composed of.
Player Game Pieces: Each player gets 23 hard plastic pieces in his color, including 9 colonies, 7 trading outposts, 3 spaceport rings (which easily slip around the colonies), 3 transporters (which fit right on top of the colonies and trading outposts), and 1 victory point marker (which goes on the victory point track). The pieces are all well-sculpted, and show what you can do when you're using plastic instead of wood. The colors (red, green, blue, and yellow) are a bit too bright for me; I might even call them garish.
Cards: All of the cards are printed on sturdy cardstock and feature rounded corners. The friendship and resource cards are small, while the encounter cards are oversized. As tends to be the case with the Catan games, the cards all make very good use of icons. The resource cards clearly match planet color with resource produced (though there are a few flaws: the red and orange planets are a littlle too similarly colored, and the resources in this case are obscure enough, including items like "carbon" and "trade goods" that the icons that represent them aren't entirely intuitive). The friendship cards make good use of icons as shorthand for what they do. The encounter cards have nice little flow charts to lead you through the encounters.
Chits & Chips: These cardboard pieces are printed on nice cardboard which matches the gameboard. The resource chits are color coded and feature production numbers for the planets; nothing fancy here. The friendship chits simply mark victory points with the common Starfarer iconography.
Game Overview Card: Each player gets a game overview card which explains building costs, turn order, and certain movement results, something I adore in the Catan games. Care has been taken to assure ease of use (a benefit often associated with European games, since they come from a multilingual environment).
Rulebook & Almanac: These rules did a fair job of explaining everything. As tends to be the case with the Catan games, there's a core rulebook which explains how the game works, sequentially, and an almanac for looking things up. I've personally never liked the split; some flipping back and forth was required.
Tray: The tray included with the Starfarers box does a very good job of keeping all the components separated and in place.
When I originally played Starfarers I wasn't too enamored with the plastic pieces, and I was in a bit of sticker shock from the high price. However, looking at it more carefully now, there's quite a bit too like about the Style: there are a lot of pieces and they're nicely sculpted; only the mother ships are problematic because of the problems with glue and the booster clips. Thanks to excellent card design and to the game overview cards, the game is quite easy to play. Thus I overall give it a Style rating of "4" out of "5". But I offer the caveat that you might fight better bang for your buck in other games; Starfarers is still more expensive than most of what's on the market.
The Game Play
As with all of the Catan-mechanic games, Starfarers of Catan centers around the settling of hexes (planets), the construction of settlements (colonies) there, and the use of those settlements to produce resources (resources). In this game victory comes from those settlements, as well as exploration and trade with alien races.
Setup: Each player starts off with a mother ship and a fame ring on it. He also gets a handful of hard plastic miniatures which denote colonies, starports, transports, and trade outposts--but before he starts placing these on the board, he'll need to take a look at the planets ...
The planets, including their resource production, are all pre-printed on the board. They're grouped in clusters of three planet, each of which has space for three colonies, one at the edge of each two-planet pair. There is a bit of randomization with the production numbers for these planets: numbered chits labeled between 2 and 12 are laid out on those planets, one per planet at setup. They're placed face up for the four colonies at the end of the board which form the players' initial homes and face down for unexplored worlds (they'll be turned up when colonized). In order to control the randomization of the game, the chits are actually divided into three different colors--yellow, blue, and red--and those are placed in specific places on the board. (Generally, the yellow are good, the blue are bad, and the red take work to settle.)
At startup each player gets to place two colonies on those initial planets, then turn one of those colonies into a starport, by slipping a little starport ring over it. Each player then gets a small assortment of starting resources.
Finally, the encounter deck is shuffled. Each of the four alien races has a set of 5 friendship cards placed next to it, which will be rewards for trade with that alien race. And the game is ready to begin. (Setup indeed does take a bit of time, as this description implies.)
Order of Play: Each turn each player gets to take the following actions, in turn:
- Production
- Trading & Building
- Movement & Exploration
- Colony & Trade Establishment
Production: Each turn a player rolls a pair of dice, and the result, between 2 and 12, shows which planets produce resources that turn.
As you'll recall each planet has a little production chit on it. When a number is rolled, all planets with that number produce their resource. Each specific planet type produces a specific resource type:
Green Planets: Food
Blue Planets: Carbon
Red Planets: Ore
Mottled Planets: Trade Goods
Orange Planets: Fuel
If you have a colony or a starport lying adjacent to a planet that produced, you get 1 resource card woth of that resource.
If a "7" is rolled, "Earth demands tribute". The active player can steal a resource card from anyone else--and anyone with more than 7 resource cards loses half of them. (And no planets produce, because there are no planets with a "7" production chit.)
Finally, the beginning of the game is speeded up by "aid from Earth": you draw a random resource card every turn than you have 9 or less victory points.
Trading: You can trade cards with other players--and you should, frequently (ie, "I've got a 'fuel' if anyone wants to trade me a 'trade goods' for it").
You can engage in trade with Earth by offering 3 of one card (ie, "3 food") for 1 of another (ie, "1 ore"). Trade Goods are more valuable, and you can trade 2 of them for 1 of another card. You can also get better trading ratios through one of the alien races (more on them later).
Building: Once you decide to start building, you'll see that you can build two broad classes of things: structures and technology. In each case you spend certain types of resource cards in certain combinations in order to build.
Structures. Each player has three types of structures they can create: trade ships, colony ships, and spaceports. A trade ship is a "transporter" spaceship placed atop a trading outpost; a colony ship is a "transporter" spaceship placed atop a colony. As I'll discuss in movement, below, those colonies actually have to be moved across the board by the transporter before they are officially "created". A spaceport is a little ring put around an existing colony; you're only allowed to produce ships next to spaceports (and thus at the beginning of the game, all of your ships are created next to your starting spaceport).
The costs of these three structures are as follows:
Trade Ship: 1 ore, 1 fuel, 2 trade goods
Colony Ship: 1 ore, 1 fuel, 1 food, 1 carbon
Spaceport: 3 carbon, 2 food
Each player only has 3 transports, and this does form a real limit for building ships throughout the game.
Technology. You can also buy technological advances just like you can buy structures--a clever expansion of the core Catan mechincs. There are three available:
Freight Ring: 2 ore
Booster: 2 fuel
Cannon: 2 carbon
Freight rings and cannons can help you colonize certain types of planets. Boosters speed up your ship movement and both they and cannons will help you out in encounters. Freight rings are also required to open trade relations with alien races. (We'll return to all those in a moment.) Each of these items are represented by a little plastic piece that you put on your mother ship.
Movement: One major new system not found in the core Catan mechanics is that of "movement" (though Teuber will return to it in The Settlers of the Stone Age). You actually have to take your various ships, fly them across the galaxy, explore planets to see if they can sustain colonies (ie, by looking at how good their production numbers), and then finally drop your colonies off.
Each turn you determine how fast your ships move by shaking your mother ship. This causes 2 (of 4) colored balls to come into view. The balls (black, blue, yellow, and red) are worth a certain number of movement points each (0, 1, 2, and 3). Unless you have a black ball, you add those up, and that's your base speed.
If you get black balled, you have an encounter. A player next to you reads a card, and you encounter merchants, space pirates, other space ships, a worm hole, aliens, or something else. You're asked to make a decision (give them resources, fight them, save them, run away, etc.), which sometimes results in your dicing off against another player with ship speed (boosters) and ship combat ability (cannons) sometimes being added to the results. And then something good or bad happens to you.
If you have an encounter your base speed is considered 3.
Whether you had an encounter or not, you add your base speed to your number of boosters and each of your ships can move that next of hex corners.
You're going to be moving your colony ships toward unexplored planets, so that you can establish colonies; and you're going to be moving your trade ships toward the alien outposts so that you can establish trade outposts.
Exploration: Whenever a ship comes to a colony spot, where a colony could be built, the player can secretly look at the production chits of the two adjacent planets. This will either reveal a number or, in the case of some red chits, pirates or ice planets that must be overcome. After looking at the chit the player may move on if he so desires.
Establishing Colonies or Outposts: If a player ends a colony ship on a colony space, he may be able to form a colony; if a player ends a trade ship on a trade intersection, he may be able to form a trade outpost.
Colonies. If both production chits your colony ship ended next to simply show numbers, and you like it, you can form a colony immediately. However, if they showed any ice planet or a pirate base, more work is required. Ice planets require you to have a certain number of freight rings and pirate bases require you to have a certain number of cannons. You must "defeat" the planet (earning a victory point) before you can colonize. When you do, you'll get to replace the pirate or ice chip with a regular production chip.
When you're all ready to colonize, you simply remove the transporter ship, and you have a new colony.
Trade Outposts. On the edges of the map are four different alien races. Each has five trading intersections, numbered one to five. If you have a trading ship and have a number of freight rings equal to the number of the least empty trading intersection, then you can use a trading ship to drop a trading outpost off with that alien ... establishing trade relations. As with the colonies, you simply remove your transporter ship and return it to your unused pile.
Every time you create a trading outpost, you receive a "friendship card" from that alien which gives you a permanent bonus. (Each alien race has 5 friendship cards, one for each trading intersection.)
These cards slightly change the rules of the game. For example:
- One "diplomat" card lets you draw a resource if you didn't receive one from the roll.
- One "green folk" card gives you an extra ore whenever you produce ore.
- One "merchant" card increases your exchange rate for food to 2:1.
- One "scientist" card acts as 2 cannons.
In addition to receiving a friendship card for each outpost, whomever has the most trading outposts with an alien race receives a friendship chip worth 2 victory points.
Winning the Game: The game goes to 15 victory points (always clearly marked on that victory track to the side of the board). These points are won by a combination of items related to outposts and colonies:
Colony: 1 VP
Spaceport: 2 VPs
Alien Friendship Chip: 2 VPs
Pirate Lair Chip: 1 VP
Ice Planet Chip: 1 VP
Fame Rings: half a VP
A chart on the board also notes all these victory conditions.
Relationships to Other Games
As noted above, The Starfarers of Catan is a game that uses and expands upon the core mechanics of The Settlers of Catan, Klaus Teuber's original and much supplemented foray into the Catan field. Besides the original Settlers, there are currently two other Catan-mechanic games: The Settlers of Nurnberg and The Settlers of the Stone Age. Each is a standalone game that expands Catan's ideas of resources, production, and building in new and innovative ways.
Fans of the original Settlers will find that Starfarers fairly decisively changes Settler's original ideas:
| Settlers | Starfarers | Comments |
| Terrain | Planets | Production now occurs on planets, which are essentially the old terrain hexes, but grouped in triads which are broadly separated from each other in space. |
| Ports | Some Aliens | They are no ports per se in Starfarers, but some alien races give friendship cards which offer the old port powers. |
| Settlements | Colonies | Largely identical. |
| Cities | Starports | Starports do not increase resource production, but do allow colony and trade ships to be built adjacently. They do also increase VPs. |
| Roads Ships |
Transporters | Instead of being built along roads or ship chains, new structures are now carried into space on transporters. |
| Development Cards | Mother Ship Tech | There is no direct replacement for Development cards, though the technology system in the mother ships probably acts as an alternative. You also get events that shake the game up, as Monopoly and such could, through the encounter cards and even some friendship card powers. |
| Longest Road Largest Army |
Alien Friendship | The alien friendship chips serve a similar role as Settler's VP cards, acting as victory points which can be passed back and forth between multiple players. |
Starfarers also has a lot of systems that are largely new, including the encounter system and the whole alien setup, all previously described.
There are currently three supplements to Starfarers of Catan: the 5-6 player expansion; a set of alien figures which may be used in place of the friendship chips; and Starship Catan, a standalone two-player game.
The Game Design
If you've trudged through all of that, you've probably arrived at the conclusion that Starfarers of Catan is a complex game. And, you'd be correct. Fortunately, Starfarers has done a good job of isolating individual decision matrixes, so that their combined complexity doesn't overwhelm the game.
At any point you've basically got a three point decision:
- Try and expand by creating new colonies.
- Try and expand by creating new outposts.
- Try and expand by increasing technologies.
Then each of those possibilities has a few decisions. It's a nice little decision tree that keeps the players from getting totally lost in different options. Likewise, turn order is used to further constrain rules complexity. Trading/building are one distinct turn, followed by movement/encounters.
I was a bit overwhelmed by the rules when I originally read them, but in actual gameplay they only seemed somewhat more complex than the original Settlers.
Beyond that, here's some of the factors that I appreciate in the Starfarers design:
Controlled Randomness: Starfarers tries to give you some control of the randomness implicit in the game by allowing you to choose which resource/planets you're going to settle upon, and which die rolls are associated with them. Likewise, the encounters allow you to make decisions which should be based upon your own technology.
Unfortunately this doesn't work as well as in the original Settlers because there are multiple levels of randomness which all can impact your decisions, including: production based on die rolls; random results of encounters; random production chits you discover upon unexplored planets; and random ship speeds, which can allow other folks to get to planets ahead of you.
The variance is slightly higher than I'd like but not as bad as in, e.g., The Seafarers of Catan, where a revealed production chit being bad can ruin turns and turns of planning (because ship movement is much more limited in Seafarers than Starfarers).
Good Player Balance: Considerable work has been done to balance out player success. For example, the "supplies from Earth" rule continues to benefit those people who are behind. Similarly certain alien friendship cards allow you to take stuff away from the leaders, including technological advances and resource cards. The fact that the alien friendship chips can be taken from other players by building additional outposts allows another way to set back the leader. Finally, like Settlers, individual players can choose to hurt the leaders by refusing to trade with them, something which has cost me victory in Settlers and Starfarers alike.
Decent Victory Conditions: It's a bit sad that there are no hidden victory points in Starfarers, as that usually benefits a game. However the way the victory points are laid out is overall well done. In general victory points can't be totally removed from the game, and thus the game is always on an upward trend (toward game end). Also, the amount that victory points can be moved from player to player provides only minor swings; you can stop someone from winning, but not put them totally out of the race, unlike in more poorly balanced games.
Multiple Paths to Victory: It looks to me that, just like in the original Settlers, there are multiple paths that you can take to victory. For example, I settled on a trade strategy originally, with the intent being to make friends with all the nice aliens. Other players weighed in toward colonies, and still other toward technological advance. Four of the five players in our game were fairly even near the end so I'd say that probably meant the multiple strategies did actually work.
Most of my complaints with Starfarers have to do with the components and with the somewhat greater level of complexity, which I'm not convinced notably enhanced the game. Minor qualms included:
Long Games: The games of Starfarers are longer than I really think a game of this strategic complexity allows. At 3 hours the game can start to get old (and this actually gets worse if you play with the 5-6 player variant, which can bring you into the 3-5 hour range).
Less Planning: Overall, I felt my ability to plan somewhat impaired in this game. Some of this was due to the higher level of randomness already noted. You never knew when you or another player might, for example, get a spacewarp to the other side of the board which would dramatically change their game play. This was particulaly the case at the start of the game when you were drawing "supplies from Earth", because you never knew what random resources you might end up with.
Annoying Player Variations: Starfarers requires different setups for three or four players (and even more for five or six with the supplement), which is always mildly annoying because you have to remember how to setup a bunch of different game types. However the three and four player games also had differences in in-game gameplay, which is even tougher to remember, because it has to be applied constantly. The fact that Starfarers plays slightly different for every number of players from 3 to 6 is actually a fairly notable flaw.
Overall the game design of Starfarers was solid and enjoyable to play. Somehow, though, it doesn't have quite the zing of the original Settlers game. I suspect that's due to the increased complexity; it may or may not improve with additional play. I'd give it a "3" out of "5" Substance rating, one less than I gave the original Settlers, though a heavy science-fiction fan might grant it back that last point.
Conclusion
Overall Starfarers does an excellent job of being true to the core concepts of Settlers of Catan while also being true to the science-fiction genre it's based upon.
I'm quite sad that the game is so expensive, thanks to the components, as that will probably keep me from picking this game up for quite some time (this playtest was done with a borrowed copy).
Though complex, the gameplay is solid. Your mileage will vary depending on what complexity of game you enjoy.
