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Review of Rivals for Catan: Age of Darkness
Blurb from the publisher: 'Compatible with all standard or Deuluxe editions of Rivals for Catan!
The Era of Intrigue: Determine Catan's spiritual balance! A Religious Dispute causes both players to lose cards. Churches and Temples minimize losses. Temple cards strengthen your access to your own draw stacks. Church cards lure opposing heroes and earn gold. With a Church and a Temple, you may build the Great Thingstead and end the conflict.
The Era of Merchant Princes: Control Catan's commerce! This set focuses on the Commercial Harbor and the Merchant's Residences, decisive buildings in the struggle for trade advantage. Maritime Trade Monopolies and the Master Merchants enhance trade ships. The Shipbuilder reduces the building costs of ships. Dominate trade using clever card combinations!
The Era of Barbarians: Barbarians invade! Both players must muster and fend off their attacks. Employ Castles, Border Fortresses, the Strategist the Caravel, and new heroes. Will you prevail or be ransacked?'
What you get: Your USD 15 or equivalent will buy you Age of Darkness, an expansion for the 2-player Rivals for Catan game line, itself an offshoot of the enormously successful and widely celebrated Catan game line.
In addition to the 20-page A5-sized English rulebook that can be found on the publisher's website free of charge, the game also contains 90 cards in three differently themed decks: The Era of Intrigue with 28 cards, The Era of Merchant Princes with 30 cards, and The Era of Barbarians with 32 cards.
Gameplay: The expansion introduces Region Expansions, i.e. cards that are placed above or below a region. Only one can be placed either above or below a region. Some are indiscriminate and can be placed next to any region. Others require a specific region type. Region Expansions follow their Regions in case of relocation, but are not affected by cards targeting buildings in settlements or cities.
Extraordinary Sites are neither units nor buildings. They cannot be targeted by attacks referring to buildings.
Road Complements add functions and properties to existing roads. In the present expansion these are buildings only.
A Metropolis is a center card, an upgrade for an existing city. The card behaves similarly to Road Complements: the city underneath retains all its functions.
Marker Cards are abstract cards that indicate a players' status in a certain area. They are not a geographical part of your principality.
Foreign Cards are cards that are not placed in your principality but in the opposing one. These cards provide bonuses to the player who built them while being detrimental to the player that hosts them.
The flow of the basic game does not change. Each of the sets included in the expansion are composed of different cards, lead to different tactics and have a different feeling.
The Era of Intrigue is centered around the Religious Dispute card, which forces the players to lose their hand cards. It is subject to mitigation from Churches and Temples. As the game progresses, the Great Thingstead will eliminate the effect of that card, at the same time however it will prohibit players from playing action-attack cards.
The Era of Merchant Princes is centered around the Commercial Harbor and the two Merchant's Residences. The objective is to continuously improve your trading options. The land will provide the materials for improving the quality of the Residences, while the Commercial Harbor will burn through the newly acquired status in order to provide any two resources. Thus, through this two-step process, two identical raw materials (be it wood or wool) will have turned into the two raw materials that you actually need.
The Era of Barbarians emulates the main theme from Catan: Cities & Knights / Catan: Cities & Knights 5-6 Player Extension. The game is now played to 13 points, the Event card stack is assembled slightly differently, while the players try to fend off the attacks of the Barbarians. The objective is to have more units than victory points from cities, Metropolises and city expansions. If you don't, you lose two resources. If you do, you win two resources. Even worse, the Barbarians will attack rather soon, seeing how they are placed under the fourth top card of the Event deck.
The rulebook ends with an extensive presentation of all of the game's cards per era, along with explanations of their powers.
The strong points: Age of Darkness was the first expansion to come out for the two-player game, and it new it had quite a few things to fix. Even though it stayed true to the game's basic rules, it didn't simply add tweaks. The cards it introduces change the game in a rather profound way.
The first and most important thing this expansion tackles is player interaction. It is easy to see how each of the three eras deals with it. In Barbarians you get to build Barbarian strongholds within your opponent's principality. It stings, not only because it is bad for him, but also because it takes valuable space that he would have liked to use differently. Marie the Shieldmaiden and the Contest of Heroes are another two examples from that same deck, that is also however the case with the Red Light Tavern and Godfrey the Intriguer from Intrigue and the monopolies cards as well as Tactical Retreat from Merchant Princes. Seeing how the game is strictly an adversarial one, most new things are about screwing your opponent in original ways. That is definitely an improvement, and particularly because the game strikes the right balance. There is take-that, yet the game is still about advancing your own lands.
Both players should be knowledgeable of all the different eras in order to be able to better ponder upon the tactics and strategies they plan to use. There are many ways one can win a game, they cannot however be examined in a lab. They are contextual, and heavily depend on what your opponent does. Thus, winning is a lot easier if you also understand what your opponent is trying to do, and foil his plans by placing obstructions inside his municipality or through causing contests that he is likely to lose, thus paying the price. Becoming aware of what each stack contains is as basic a tactic as it was in the original. Even more so, because the number of cards that allow manipulation are more than they ever were. As an example, in Merchant Prices a clever player should be drowning in raw material. He'd better have the right things to build at the right time, in order to create the most efficiently producing machinery possible.
The modularity and replayability of the base game was already high. With this expansion it skyrockets. Owning both expansions means that you can play for years and never get bored, especially when it comes to the Duel of the Princes or a tournament game. The card index and the detailed explanations at the end of the rulebook are once again classy and aid a lot towards better deconstructing the game. Those who want to invest more of their time to create customized decks can do so easily.
When it comes to theme, those playing Catan will instantly recognize some of the things it tries to appropriate from the boardgame and present them again for two players. In many ways the present expansion is an ode to Cities and Knights with all the trading advantages or the Barbarians. The religious theme is a bit off, I liked however how it got introduced in a thematically appropriate way. Bonus points for the religions in turmoil being Christianity and the Norse gods. The insertion of any other religious conflict might have been rather tricky.
The artwork follows on the path of the initial Rivals for Catan. Everything is where it needs to be, and the cards never get busy.
I liked how the new decks fit the Deluxe base game's box without much fuss, even when sleeved. Good job! The inclusion of ziplock bags for each era is classy.
This is not the only expansion out for Rivals for Catan. It was followed by Age of Enlightenment, which we will see together shortly.
The weak points: Age of Darkness will not necessarily make you like Rivals for Catan if you didn't do so before. It is addressed to converts, not to those who are still sitting on the fence. As a long-time fan of Catan I like it, but your mileage may vary depending on what you are looking for in an adversarial/developmental card game.
Each expansion doesn't necessarily change the game's complexity, it is however likely to favour the player that knows what he is doing in advance. Be polite and understanding with newer acolytes and help them learn the game, instead of beating them senseless. There are certain things here and there that I myself did not like. As an example, I felt that Merchant Princes runs on a rather visible rich-get-richer thread, and once you fall behind you cannot really catch up. Then again, my statistically insignificant number of plays cannot really lead to safe conclusions.
As much as I appreciated the card index, in reality some of the entries contain information that should have found its way on the actual card. That shouldn't have happened. The index should be there as an added value, not as a provider of vital information.
The cards remain square and that won't change. Oh, well. Like in the base game, the letters on the cards are rather small. A player can still read his own cards, yet reading your opponent's cards which you see upside down is nigh-on-impossible. For a game that wants to increase its players' negative interactions one would have expected more of an effort.
Compared to Age of Enlightenment, its younger brother, Age of Darkness comes out as rather underpowered when it comes to the number of cards it contains. That was not known in 2011 and 2012 when the two respective games came out, it is however known now. In all fairness, I don't feel there should have been two releases. The contents of both should have been included in one single expansion pack, as was the case with the English edition of Settlers of Catan the Card Game back in the day.
Conclusion: Rivals for Catan: Age of Darkness is a strong expansion. It enhances the basic game, eliminates the stigma of a multi-player solitaire, creates a thousand new combos and possibilities, and increases its modularity and replayability. I can't imagine how someone can play with Rivals but not with Age of Darkness as well.
For more info on Rivals For Catan: Age of Darkness visit Catan Studio at https://www.catanstudio.com.
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