Review of Elasund: The First City

Elasund: The First City is the newest Catan Adventures game by Klaus Teuber & Mayfair Games, but it departs quite far from its Settler-ancestor gameplay.

Players: 2-4
Time: 60-90 minutes
Difficulty: 4 (of 10)

The Components

Elasund: The First City comes with a large set of nice components:

• 1 game board
• Wooden Bits:
  • 40 VP cubes
  • 4 round cylinders
  • 1 boat
  • 2 wooden dice
• Cardboard Bits:
  • 2 city gates
  • 37 buildings
  • 9 church tiles
  • 36 city walls
  • 20 buiding permits
  • 4 turn overview sheets
• 51 gold cards
• 39 influence cards
• 1 rulebook

Gameboard: A four-panel linen-textured gameboard printed in full color. This is a very full gameboard, with a 9x10 grid of the city in the middle, sprinkled with clear depictions of trade spaces, starting spaces, and the church building spaces. Spaces for the city wall run around the outside. There's also a trade track and a depiction of the church, used to help you lay out that 3x3 building correctly. It's all relatively attractive, but more importantly very easy to use, a strength of almost any Catan game.

Wooden Bits: There are a variety of high-quality wooden pieces. These include 10 small cubes and 1 cylinder in each of the 4 player colors (red, green, blue, and yellow). There's also a wooden boat (the same model as used in Cities & Knights of Catan, as it happens) and a pair of wooden dice; I sometimes have troubles with wooden dice, but these seemed relatively unbiased.

Cardboard Bits: The cardboard in this game is all thick and linen-textured. The various city tiles all feature very nice and evocative full-color art depicting the buildings that will be constructed in the city.

The tiles are various sizes, from the small city walls to the 2x3 large public buildings. These tiles include 9 wall tiles in each player color, 4 starting buildings in each player color, 21 neutral buildings, and the 9 part church, which is a 3x3 building, but split up into 9 tiles. (It's so big that it takes a while to build).

Good work has been done to make all the pieces easy to use. The buildings always have costs at the bottom right and production at the top left. Flags clearly depict spaces where you put victory point cubes. The church tiles cleverly have their costs on the back, since they're kept face-down, and also make good use of positioning marks on the front so that you can quickly see which segment of the church you've built. The city gates list the costs for building city walls either toward the city or along the far wall.

Each player also gets 5 building permits in their color. These are circular discs with a number from 0 to 4 on the scroll. They're utilitarian, but one of the few pieces that aren't particularly beautiful.

Finally, each player also gets a cardboard sheet listing the four phases of the game and reminding players of how they can spend influence cards to modify actions in each phase. It leaves out a couple of things (namely the gold cost of building markers), but is nonetheless entirely invaluable for playing the game.

Cards: The game comes with two decks of cads printed on medium-weight cardstock. One deck simply includes gold cards of value 1 while the other includes influence cards in the 3 influence colors (red, green blue). Each color also has a matching icon for the colorblind.

Choosing three of the player colors for the three influence colors confused a player or two initially, but they got over it.

Rulebook: A six-page rulesheet that does a good job of explaining the game with lots of full-color examples; I know a rulebook is good when I pull it out to show players an example while explaining the game; I did here.

Box & Tray: A standard German square box. The tray is terrific because it has individual spaces for every type of piece. In addition it survived the flip-upside-down test: all the pieces were still in their slots afterward(!).

Overall, Elasund has lots of nice-looking pieces and looks great when you're playing it. The pieces are all top quality and a lot of work has been done to make them easy to use, something that Klaus Teuber seems very good at. Thus Elasund earns a top rating of "5" out of "5" for Style.

The Gameplay

The object of Elasund is to build major buildings, help construct a church, encourage trade, and build up the city wall--all of which allow the players to place their victory point cubes on the board.

Setup: Each player is given a set of 4 buildings, 9 wall segments, and 5 building permits. These are all items that they may construct. They also get 10 victory point cubes (which they need to place to win) and one trade marker (which is put at 0 on the trade track).

Each player gets to place two of his buildings, one of which generates gold and one of which generates influence, on the board in designated places.

Each player take 3 gold and 1 random influence card.

A set of neutral buildings are placed to the side of the board for anyone to build.

Finally, city walls are set up to define the size of the city: a 4-player game uses the whole board, while fewer players will compete in a smaller section.

Gold. All gold is identical. Each card is marked "1" gold.

Influence. There are three types of influence cards: red, blue, and green. To do some things you need matched influence cards and to do some things you need different influence cards.

Order of Play: On their turn a player gets to take the following actions:

• Roll Dice
• Build Buildings
• Place a Building Permit
• Take a Special Action

Roll Dice: This is going to be the one truly familiar element to long-term Settlers of Catan players. The active player rolls two six-sided dice. A ship is then moved to one of the 10 rows of the city. Each building which is even partially in that row generates any gold or influence marked on the building for its owner. (Not all buildings generate these items; some are only worth victory points.)

The "ship row" where the ship is located also determines where building permits can be placed that turn, as noted below.

Identical Rolls. If you rolled the same number as the ship is already sitting on, you instead move it exactly two spaces up or down. This nicely prevents runs of numbers and also gives you an occasional bit of extra control on some turns.

Pirates. As you might expect in a Catan game, if you roll a "7" something bad happens. Pirates! The player puts the ship in a row of his choice (but not the previous row it was in). Each player with a victory-point building even partially in that row has to give up 1 card per building. And, if the active player controls any towers (which appear on some city wall segments) then he gets to randomly take one discarded card per tower.

Build Buildings: On a player's turn he may build either one or two buildings. These can be: city buildings; city walls; or church sections.

City Buildings. Each player has 2 of his own buildings that he can build, plus a number of neutral buildings. These vary in size from 1x1 to 2x3 and they vary in cost from 2 to 5 gold and from 1 to 3 building permits.

Building permits are pieces that you can play on the board for a cost in gold. This happens down in the third phase of your turn, which we hvaen't gotten to yet. In order to place a building that requires 1 building permit, it must go on top of 1 building permit, while similarly a building that costs 3 building permits must cover 3 building permits on the board.

These building permits don't all have to belong to you. However the total value of your own building permits that you'll be covering must exceed the total cost of each other player's building permits in that area. And, other players' building permits do count toward your requirement for building permit minimums. So, if you were going to build one of those mammoth 2x3 buildings that require 3 building permits, and you had a "0" and a "2" there and your opponent had a "1" then you'd meet both requirements for building: 3 building permits and the highest total value. However, if you build atop another player's building permits you have to pay them the value of the permit in gold.

You can also build atop other buildings. If the building is smaller, no problem; they call that urban renewal. If it's the same size then you have to pay 3 influence cards of the same color to do so. (Influence lets you do lots of "illegal" things in the game.)

Buildings do various things: some will provide you gold in dice-rolling phase, some will provide you influence. All the neutral buildings will let you play either 1 or 2 victory point cubes.

Also, if a player builds a city building on any trade spots (marked by windmills, and appearing at the docks and by the city gates) he gets one trade point per windmill. These are marked on a trade track and he gets to place victory point cubes on the trade track as he climbs it (at 3, 5, 7, 9 , and 11, though the higher spaces are all limited, allowing only the first few players to place their cubes).

City Walls. You have a set of 9 city walls which you can build as long as there's still space around the city. These initially cost 2 gold each, when you're building toward the sea, but when those initial spaces are built up the rest cost 4 gold each, until the wall is all built.

You build your city walls in order. The first couple give you an influence card each when you build them. Your city walls maked #3, #6, and #9 are guard towers; they let you place a VP cube and later collect cards taken by the pirates. The other city wall pieces let you draw 2 influence cards when you build them.

Church. You can build a church piece by paying 7 gold. Each of these pieces forms 1/9th of the final church (making the whole thing a 63 gold boondoggle). The first player who builds part of the church gets to look at the first two pieces, then place one on the church starting space (which is out near the docks). This determines the direction that the church will get built in, because the other 8 pieces are placed in their correct orientation to form the big "church picture".

Church pieces always build over other buildings, giving that first player considerable power because he's going to decide what the church ultimately destroys as it's built up.

Each church piece allows the placement of 1 VP cube.

Place a Building Permit: Next a player either places a building permit in the current ship row or else take 2 gold. Placing a permit costs the player the value of the permit (from 0 to 4 gold).

A player can discard 2 influence cards of the same color to build the permit in a different row.

Take a Special Action: Finally a player can take up to one special action, all of which require influence cards.

• Take 2 gold. (3 different influence)
• Place a bonus building permit. (3 different influence + gold cost)
• Upgrade a building permit. (2 identical influence + gold difference)
• Move a building permit. (2 identical influence)

Winning the Game: A player wins when he's placed all 10 of VP cubes on some combination of neutral buildings, city walls, church pieces, and the trade track.

Relationships to Other Games

Elasund: The First City is Klaus Teuber's second "Catan Adventures" game, meant to show the history of the island of Catan. The first was Candamir: The First Settlers.

More importantly, it does share some common Teuber mechanics. Many of these mechanics hark back to Settlers of Catan. You have a roll producing resources on each turn, with a "7" being bad, and you have those resources being turned in for constructing various items. You do this in order to collect 10 VPs, which are won by some combination of different building types and a race track for control of a specific area of expertise (in Settlers, longest road and largest army, here, trade). As with the previous Adventures release, Candamir, this one marks VPs by placing cubes rather than marking points on another track, a great innovation.

However, for all of that, Elasund is a dramatically different game then anything else that Teuber has produced. Some of the people I played with who don't like Settlers liked this; conversely I'm not entirely sure that Settlers players will enjoy this one because of its increased complexity (though a Cities & Knights player more likely will).

Though it might not be entirely obvious from my description, Elasund is at heart a game of conflict. You're ruthlessly trying to take advantage of other players by stealing their building permits and building over their buildings, or else trying to correctly deploy permits and buildings alike to secure your own on-board investments. The first game that sprung to mind after I read Elasund's rule was actually Teuber's Domaine, the only other Teuber game I've played which has direct (but innovative) conflict like this. However after my first play of the game one of the player's offered a better comparison: New England.

Like New England you're laying tiles down to both score victory points and antagonize your opponents. Both games have a lot of breadth for cunning and treachery, and both center on a combination of resource management and tile-laying. Elasund is a heavier game than New England with more choices, more interaction, and more thought required.

(To be entirely correct the player that made the New England comparison said that he thought that Elasund was "New England done right", which I don't agree with only because I like New England as well.)

The Game Design

Elasund: The First City was a surprise. I was expecting a light, random board game that played a lot like the many other Settlers brethren. Instead I got a tight game heavy in strategy and tactics that allows for agressive, even mean gameplay. Wow, what a difference.

Overall, Elasund plays well. It has good strategy in that you can try several different paths for victory, including concentrating on gold or influence, on city walls or trade spots. It's also got great tactics, particularly in the surprising ways in which you can use building permits to grab ahold of other players resources, impede their success, or just get in their way. (This level of tactics wasn't obvious through the first half of my first game, but it slowly opens up as you grow familiar with the system.) I also though the game had good depth because there are so many different special things you can do, by spending influence cards. Finally, there's some clever player interaction; it's not straight out warfare, but neither is it a race or anything less direct; there's some neat brinkmanship thrown in as well.

Another nice aspect of the game is that the luck is controlled. If you're not producing gold you can always forgo putting down a building permit. If you're not producing influence you can usually build city walls. (I got stuck without influence late in my second game, and thus unable to do clever things, but this was really my own fault, because I'd been concentrating on gold buildings rather than influence buildings up to that point.)

I will offer one caveat, which is that I'm not entirely convinced that the depth of tactics is as great as is originally implied. The constraints of the game, which require you to telegraph your "attacks" due to the ordering of the player turn (build before you lay out new permits). feels like it ultimately keeps some tactics of opposition from really working. However, it's equally possible that I just wasn't skilled enough to carry out some of my attacks; more plays will be required to see how this turns out.

On the down side, the game is somewhat complex. It's riddled with special cases in every phase of the game, and this can make it a bit tricky to learn or to teach. I also found it a bit dry in my first game, though this is ultimately a player preference.

On the whole Elasund is an interesting, well-designed, and surprising board game by Klaus Teuber. I think it's the most original work he's done in a number of years and that it may appeal to a group of heavier gamers than many of his other works. It earns a "4" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

Elasund: The First City is not just another Settlers of Catan variant. Although it uses some core Catan conceits surrounding die rolls and resource production it's actually a very conflictive and tight strategy game of tile placement and brinkmanship. I think it'll appeal to a more serious group of gamers than most of the other Catan games. Beyond that it's quite an enjoyable and original game that's well worth a look.