Seafarers of Catan: fifth scenario - The Forgotten Tribe

Last night we decided to try the fifth scenario for Seafarers of Catan. This one is called 'The Forgotten Tribe'. The story is that some new islands have been discovered; on the small outlying ones, settlements can't be built, but if ships go and explore them, the inhabitants will give generous gifts.

These gifts comprise victory points, develoment cards, and harbours. So the setup - done according to the booklet - looks slightly bizarre:


Four development cards, six of the Seafarers 'chits' (worth a development point each) and six harbours are placed on the little islands around the edge of the board. If a ship is placed on the edge containing a 'gift', the player receives it.

I still haven't quite figured out strategy for initial placements, and it was even more difficult with this scenario, since there were no harbours to aim for. If we gained harbours, we could place them next to coastal settlements - but that was for later on in the game.

Here's how the main island part of the board looked after we'd made the initial placements:


We'd each chosen a fairly wide range of numbers, with access - in theory - to all five resources.

The point of this game, obviously, is to explore outlying islands so we started building ships as soon as we could, and sailed off in opposite directions. As in previous games, the 'longest street' card (for unbroken routes which could have ships or streets or both) changed hands several times.

Here's how it looked after we'd each explored one set of small islands:


Clearly Richard (red) was in a better position to explore more islands than I was, and he started using the useful technique - a new one in Seafarers - of moving a leading ship whenever he could, to aim in a different direction and thus find more islands. Since we couldn't build anything on the outlying islands, there was always a leading ship available to move, so long as the pirate piece wasn't in an adjoining sea hex.

After a while I joined up my two sections of street, so that I had, pretty much unassailably, the longest street card. Richard had the largest army card, however, and he also had four little victory point chits. I reached the stage where I'd built all my settlements and three cities, and simply wasn't getting much ore. So I concentrated on buying cards. I had only one victory point chit, and none on development cards, but I thought that if I kept buying cards I might eventually gain the largest army, since Richard was still trying to explore all the islands and also needed to build another settlement and city.

Finally I succeeded. With my 11 points of buildings, largest army and longest street, plus the extra chit I had been given, I had 16 - which was the winning number.


Then we counted up Richard's points. He had ten in buildings, four of the little chits, and a victory point card, making 15 in all. Which meant that, before I took the largest army card from him, he actually had 17... but was so caught up in exploring the islands and collecting 'gifts' that he hadn't thought to count.


I'm not sure who won, technically. I suppose we should both have been counting... maybe it was a draw.