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The Seafarers of Catan is an expansion for Klaus Tuber's The Settlers of Catan, adding a bit more strategy and some exploration elements to the game.
Players: 3-4
Playing Time: 1-2 hours
Difficulty: 4 (of 10)
This supplement requires The Settlers of Catan to play, and you may wish to read my review of the original game.
This is a revision/expansion of a review originally published in November, 2002.
The Components
Here's what you get in the Seafarers box:
- 14 edge pieces
- 24 hexagonal tiles
- 12 harbor markers
- 10 number markers
- 8 victory point markers
- 61 wooden ships
- 1 Rule Book
Edge Pieces: The edge pieces are solid cardboard printed with Catan seas. They're intended to hold the board together. You arrange them in a rectangle, and then you place the hexes inside. Personally I don't find the edges that useful as I'm used to the Catan board sliding around a bit, and would have preferred a cheaper game without these bits, but some people might appreciate the aesthetics. (And, I must admit, a set of tiles edged in by these pieces bears a strong resemblence to a regular game board, and that's kind of cool.)
Tiles & Markers: The new tiles are perfect matches for the original, intended to offer expansion out into new realms. 2 of the tiles are new "gold fields" which are explained below, in The Game Play.
The harbor markers are little triangular beacons that you put where land and sea meet, to mark harbors for maritime trade. They're marked with "2:1" and "3:1" ratios just like the old harbor/sea hexes. This new approach was needed because some of the harbors can now be on the edge pieces holding the map together. Personally, I would have prefererred that a consistent approach be taken from the start, so that there wouldn't be component duplication, but given that a new approach was needed, this one is pretty elegant.
The ten number markers are used for resource production, just like in the original Settlers. These ones are easy to distinguish from the originals because they don't have letters on their front. They're meant to be placed on distant, newly discovered islands & to be otherwise used in scenarios.
Victory Point Markers: The eight victory point markers are simply used to keep track of when you get bonus victory points not shown on the board by your buildings or cards (typically by exploring islands in the scenarios). They're simple, yet pretty pictures of flags. Kosmos and Mayfair have done a pretty good job of using this particular icon for bonus victory point markers in most of their Catan games, which gets definite points for consistency.
Wood Bits: The ships are wooden pieces that match the roads, cities, and settlements that you get in Settlers. There are 15 for each player (white, orange, blue, red) and a special black ship, which is for the Pirate (an analogue to the Robber).
Rule Book: The rulebook lists the new rules for Seafarers (5 pages), then lists 11 different scenarios for either 3 or 4 players. The rulebook has one major flaw which is that it displays maps showing how to layout tiles for the scenarios in black and white. There's almost no way to distinguish between a couple of the terrains without carefully and repetitively examing the tiles.
(Addendum: More recent editions of Seafarers of Catan than mine do come with a full-color rulebook, which is also available online here.)
The major component missing from Seafarers is some type of Building Card showing you the price for ships. One of the beauties of the original Settlers game is that all the important rules are right there, in front of the players. Forcing players to memorize the cost and value of the ships, no matter how easy that single item is, is a pretty remarkable change from the original Settlers game.
Overall, the components of Seafarers remain very high quality, just like Settlers, though the printing of the rule book in black and white is a real pity, given the contents. However, the price-to-content ratio is definitely worse than with the original Settlers, thus Seafarers earns an entirely average "3" out of "5" for Style.
The Game Play
The Seafarers of Catan introduces a number of new play elements to the game. Here's a rundown:
More Tiles: To start off with you get the aforementioned 24 extra hexagonal tiles and 10 new number markers to go with them. 12 of the new tiles are water and 3 are deserts. The remaining 9 are a standard mixture of the 5 Catan land types plus 2 new gold tiles.
The presence of these extra tiles allows you to make maps larger than the standard Catan island. Typically you use the edge pieces to define a rectangle, then lay pieces to fill the rectangle as appropriate.
Gold Tiles. These are effectively wild cards. When their number comes up, each adjacent player may produce any resource that he likes.
Scenarios: In order to fill in those edged rectangles you no longer use totally random setups like in the original Catan. Instead, you must pick a scenario, and lay out the board according to a diagram in the rulebook (though there's actually one entirely random setup).
The various scenarios tend to involve a couple of different islands separated from each other by ocean. A couple of the scenarios also leave some space within the "frame" blank, allowing for exploration (ie, tiles to be revealed during play). Whatever island the players begin on also tends to be smaller than the original Catan island.
Theoretically, once you've got your board laid out, have placed your initial settlements and roads, and have started the player turns, you could play Seafarers exactly like Settlers. You could build roads, settlements, and cities, and try to rise to ascendancy in your little mini-Catan. However, there's one more major change ...
Ships: You can now build ships to explore the oceans and other islands. As with anything else, ships cost resources to build: a sheep and a wood. They may be built on any edge of a water hex (including a water-land edge) and must be built adjacent to either a ship or a settlement.
The main purposes of ships are to explore and to allow the construction of settlements overseas. When you are playing scenarios which have "exploration areas", as soon as a ship comes adjacent to an empty hex, that hex is randomly inserted. Once you've discovered overseas lands you may build settlements adjacent to your ships--just as they may be built adjacent to roads.
Shipping Lanes may also be used to count as "Longest Road". This could be through a single long Shipping Lane or a Shipping Lane that connects up to a Road through a city. (Shipping Lanes touching roads without a City in-between are not considered connected.)
Moving Ships. Ships have one other special rule: they can be moved (or "twiddled" or "flipped" according to my gaming group). Essentially, you can flip the ship at the end of a Shipping Lane (a/ka "the Ship Road") to the adjacent hex edge which also connects to the ship before it in the Shipping Lane. This helps to offset bad luck in flipping useless tiles when you're exploring.
Sea Victory Points. Ships have one other important use: most of the scenarios give bonus victory points for reaching distant islands. When you earn these you just take one of the new victory point markers and lay it next to you.
The Pirate: There's only one other new rule of note: the pirate. This is a black ship which may be moved instead of the robber when a "7" is rolled or a soldier card is played. After moving the pirate, the player who did so gets to steal a card from a player with a ship adjacent. The pirate also prevents ships from being built or moved on his hex edges.
Relationships to Other Games
As has already been discussed, The Seafarers of Catan is an expansion to Klaus Teuber's The Settlers of Catan. There's one other core expansion: The Cities & Knights of Catan. The two expansions can be used together or not, as you prefer.
Many players seem to like one or the other of the supplements. Seafarers is a pretty simple expansion of Settlers which adheres to the core ideals of the game and gives it a little bit more strategic complexity. Conversely Cities & Knights adds quite a bit to the strategic complexity of the game, taking it out of the "casual" category. Whether you like Settler's innate simplicity or desire a much more complex game will probably determine which of the two you like.
The Game Design
Overall, The Seafarers of Catan is a relatively small change for the Settlers system. It adds one major option to the overall Settlers decision matrix ("buy a ship?") and beyond that is mostly chrome. Here's what the important new game play elements do:
Gold Tiles: This new option adds some new color, but scarcely changes the design. The best use of the gold tiles is to offbalance sides of a board which are otherwise weak or else encourage to exploration (if the gold tiles are in the potential exploration mix) and in these ways they succeed well.
Scenarios: These are a pretty pivotal change in the Settlers design, since the original game was all about randomized boards. I personally feel a bit uncomfortable about the non-random scenarios, because they change the entire paradigm of Settlers.
However, considered in and of themselves the scenarios offer a great way to take some of the random factor out of Catan and instead produce a well-balanced board. In addition, they can add a lot of color through neat layouts and special victory conditions in scenarios. Thus, for overall increasing the replayability of the Settlers series, these are well worthwhile.
Ships: Overall, these add a little strategic complexity without much difficulty. By being a pretty close match to the standard rules, they integrate well.
In addition, the ships help balance the original Settlers game because they add support for what until then had been a weak strategy: collecting sheep. In the original game, those wooly beasties were usually overabundent in end-game. Now, there's a use for them: more ships. A very nice catch.
On the downside, the way that ships relate to roads is fairly confusing. They're considered somewhat equivalent, since they can be combined to form Longest Road, but ships must connect only to ships or cities (just as roads must connect only to roads or cities). You can't connect up a ship to a road. I can see some balance reasons for this, but someone makes this mistake just about every time Seafarers is played, which is my prime criteria for whether a rule is good or not.
Looking just at the gameplay of Seafarers of Catan, the new rules are worthwhile, interesting, and add to the original Settlers game in beneficial ways. Thus it earns an above average "4" out of "5" for Substance.
Conclusion
Overall, Seafarers offers an interesting addition to The Settlers of Catan. If you're playing with advanced players, in particular, you'll probably have a lot of fun playing this as alternative to basic Settlers. (And, more casual players may well like this as well, as it's not that terribly complex.)
I do think the price-point is too high for the new components and gameplay presented, but once you get past that, you'll be glad to have the supplement.
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