Imagine my delight when we opened our gifts on Christmas morning, to find both expansions AND their extensions! The only problem, then, was which to play first. We decided on Seafarers of Catan, since one of our guests had played it before, and since it seemed rather simpler to master than Cities and Knights.
A quick explanation sufficed before we began. There are little islands in addition to the main island of Catan and they can be reached by ships. Ships cost one wood and one sheep resource, and are placed like roads, but on sea tiles, or coastline. Ships can be added to roads for the longest 'trade route', but ships can only be next to roads if there is a settlement between them. There are also little chits for extra victory points when building the first settlement on one of the little islands; everyone has to build their initial pieces on the main island of Catan.
Oh, and there's a new 'gold' resource tile, which allows people with adjoining buildings to collect any resource of their choice. Very useful. The booklet recommends playing to 13 points.
There are several possible set-ups for Seafarers, but we started with the simplest one which, basically, showed us how the ships worked. We decided to play just a four-player game, with Tim and me in a team. Tim rolled a double six so we started, and could quickly see that both clay and ore were going to be in short supply. So, after some discussion, we built on one of the 9-ore hexes, with some other reasonable numbers: six on sheep, ten on wood.
The others mostly built on the coast, intending to buy ships and expand outwards, so by the time Tim and I got to place our second settlement, there were not many useful places to play on the coast. On the other hand, the side of Catan away from the little islands was pretty much empty. We needed wheat and clay, but there was no way to get clay. So we built on another 9-ore hex which gave us also two other numbers on wheat hexes.
Richard (red) and Sheila (brown) quickly bought ships and sailed to other islands, where they gained an extra victory point each by building a new settlement. Tim and I didn't see any easy way to explore, so we concentrated on the main island and traded for clay. We picked up a surprising amount of ore and wheat early in the game, and built two cities before we expanded very far. We also bought a useful knight card.
We then, with much trading, built on a 3-1 trading harbour, and then gradually moved towards a sheep harbour, building settlements - which we turned to cities when we could, and also a couple of other cards, one of which was a victory point card. I started to wonder if we could sail out to the gold resource tile where Richard had one settlement, so we did buy one boat, but it wasn't much use.
Then a remarkable number of 9s were rolled. By that stage, we had a city and a settlement on EACH of the 9-ore hexes. So for each 9, we picked up 6 ore resource cards. Unfortunately, we kept on rolling sevens, so kept having to return a pile of cards to the bank, but we still managed to continue building until all four cities were on the board. We were also picking up sheep and wheat, so we bought another card or two, and traded for clay whenever we could, to expand, slowly, outwards.
Richard and Jörn were not doing so well with their numbers - both seemed to be stuck on five points. Richard had no access to anything other than clay and wood, other than with his settlement on the 9-gold island tile, and Jörn didn't have very good numbers anyway. So Tim and I had nine points on the board, Sheila had 7 plus 2 for the longest trade route. I had been eying up the gap between my two lots of roads, but realised I'd need four to join them to take the longest route card, so - having played two knight cards - I was thinking that perhaps we should aim for the largest army, and buy some more cards.
After a slower round, Tim and I managed to build another street and another settlement - giving us ten points. I wasn't really counting; it seemed that we were still a long way from 13. But teamwork is a good thing. I was about to buy another card, when he grabbed them from me, pondered a moment, then traded with the bank in order to buy another street. What I had not noticed was that our longer street had the same number of segments as Sheila's so we only needed one more to take the longest road card. And, with our victory point development card, that gave us 13 points.
It wasn't a particularly long game, and we decided that it would probably have been better to play to 15 points. We also realised that it was a simple scenario so that we got used to the idea of buying ships and exploring. None of us even thought to use the pirate (which can attack ships) instead of the robber. And it probably didn't work quite as it should since Tim and I basically ignored the exploration and sailing, and expanded on the main island easily with little opposition. Once again, by far the most significant part of the game was the initial placement of settlements.
Still, it was a good game and a very nice extra to the basic Settlers game. We look forward to playing further versions of it in the weeks ahead, and also to learning the Cities and Knights expansion.
Goodness, Sue, now I have *another* of your blogs to follow! We haven't played any of the extra Settlers games yet, so I'm interested to hear about them :)
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