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The Seafarers of Catan 5-6 Player Expansion does pretty much the same thing as The Settlers of Catan 5-6 Player Expansion did: it lets you bring another 2 players into your Catan game. If you're already playing the original Catan with 5 or 6 players, you know pretty much what to expect here.
Players: 5-6
Playing Time: 2-3 hours
Difficulty: 4 (of 10)
This is a revision/expansion of a review originally published in November, 2002.
The Components
Sadly, the contents of this box are pretty sparse:
- 9 hexagonal tiles
- 6 victory point markers
- 30 wooden ships
- 1 rule book
Tiles: You get 8 ocean hexes and 1 more gold field.
Wooden Ships: The new colors are, as usual, green and brown.
Rulebook: The real winner in this expansion is the rule book, which is printed four-color. This is quite nice because the book contains 10 scenarios for 5 or 6 players and because they're in color you can easily figure out how to layout the board, unlike the scenarios in the original Seafarers rulebook. As with Seafarers, the maps are mostly set, some are randomized at startup, and some are randomized through play.
The inclusion of a large, full-color scenario book is a very nice touch, and all the components are up to their usual standards, but overall the price is quite high for what you get inside, and thus I can only rate the Style of this supplement as "2" out of "5".
The Game Play
As with all the 5-6 Player Settlers expansions, there's a minor rule change:
Special Building Phase: After the end of each player's full turn (production/trading/building), all players then get an opportunity to build. If order matters, each player builds clockwise around the table from the player whose turn it was. There's no playing of cards during this phase or trading--just building.
The Game Design
There's very little to say about the design that I didn't already say in the Settlers of Catan 5-6 Player Expansion review. Simply: the rule change for this supplement does a good job of expanding the game out to 5 or 6 players, but lacks something in elegance.
This game earns the same Substance rating as its parent game, Seafarers: "4" out of "5".
Conclusion
You've really already made your decision about whether to buy this supplement. If you own The Settlers 5-6 Player Expansion and you own Seafarers, you need this one too; anything else is fairly irrelevent.
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