Seafarers of Catan: seventh scenario - Pirate Islands

We decided to try out the seventh scenario from Seafarers last night. It looked a lot more complicated than the previous ones; even the board was bigger. The robber is not used in this game, and the pirate ship moves on a set route, the number of hexes moved depending on whichever die shows the lower number for each move. The pirate ship attacks any city or settlement where it lands.

Moreover, there's no chance to explore - instead we had to build ships on a set route towards one of the pirate fortresses at the other end of the board. There's no 'longest route' card, no 'largest army'. Instead, a race to destroy the pirate fortress, as well as building cities and settlements as usual on the main island. There isn't even a variable set-up for this game.

So we followed the directions in the booklet, placed the fortresses and initial settlement as required in the booklet. They give instructions for both a three-player or four-player game; we simply ignored the other pieces and set ours up as the red and yellow shown in the booklet - fortunately in symmetric places. Then we built two settlements of our choice each, in the usual way (me, then two for Richard, then one for me) rather than three since one was already built with a ship, and took resources for the two we chose. Here's how it looked after we'd done so:


There weren't any really obvious places, so we chose as best we could. I would have liked a 6...

At the start of each turn, the pirate ship moved forward. It wasn't long before it landed on the hex next to Richard's pre-determined settlement:


The strength of the pirate is also the number on the lower of the two dice. Richard's strength was the number of his warships. That's not the regular ships... a warship is built when someone has bought a knight from the development cards, and then (on the following turn) played it. At this stage, Richard had not bought any cards so he had no warships. The pirate ship vanquished him... meaning he lost a random resource card from his hand. If he'd built any cities, he would have lost another card for each city, too. We're not sure what would happen if he didn't have any cards in his hand at that point.

I quickly realised the great importance of buying development cards, and did so whenever I could, even though it delayed some of my buildings. I picked up a couple of knights, and on subsequent turns played them, which gave me two warships. Slightly surreally, a warship is shown by turning a regular ship on its side:


I kept buying ships and cards, as well as gradually expanding. It was odd: at first Richard was picking up a lot more cards than I was (his 6 on wheat helped) but he didn't seem able to do much with them. Then for some reason his settlement was attacked by the pirate ship WAY more than mine was, meaning that he lost quite a few cards since he managed very few warships.

After a while, I built my ships as far as the pirate fortress:


I had five warships, so decided to attack. The way to do that is to roll one die. That determines the strength of the pirate fortress. Mine is, again, determined by my number of warships. I was lucky: each time I rolled a number less than five, which meant that I removed one of the three 'chits' that was underneath the fortress. So after three turns, I'd defeated the pirates, which gave me that settlement.

If the pirate fortress had been stronger, I would have lost my two closest ships.

The winner, according to the booklet, is whoever has defeated the pirate fortress and has at least 10 points. We decided to make it 12 points (since I already had 10 by that stage) so we played a few more rounds before I finally won:


I was quite a long way ahead. Richard only had 6 points as he'd only been able to build one city.

Unusually (for me) six of the seven cards I bought were knights:


Very useful in this particular game!