Seafarers of Catan: fog Island (random numbers) for four

Last night we had John and Sarah for a meal, and decided to play a round of Seafarers of Catan. Sarah had never played before; John had only played once, when we taught our other friends with the lengthy five-person Seafarers game last week. We decided to do our favourite 'Fog Island' again, as it's the easiest way to explain how the Seafarers rules work.

We set up the random version of the main island, with both resources and numbers, which was quicker than following the booklet instructions. It didn't take too long to make our initial choices of settlement placements:


There weren't any obviously brilliant places, and since the resources were rather clumped together, we all opted for a range of numbers rather than trying to get access to all the resources. As someone observed, there were only three intersections which gave access to three different resources - and one of those was unreachable due to another placement.

I did waver between the 8-9 intersection on the coast with sheep and grain, for my second placement, or the 6-10 on a different coastline giving two grain - which would also have slightly annoyed Richard who hoped for that harbour. I decided that the 8-9 was better: the numbers were slightly better, and it gave me two different resources.

I had cause to regret that decision somewhat during the game!

John and Sarah both started building boats as soon as they could, so as to explore the 'fog island' spaces, and John quickly gained the longest trade route card:


He didn't expect to keep it... however, he really liked the exploration part of the game, so he kept building ships and turning over tiles, and soon had such a long trade route that nobody was likely to overtake him:


By that stage Richard had started sailing out to explore too, and I built a couple of boats since that's how this game works... but John had already explored most of the territory near my ships, so I might have done better to expand on the main island and forget about ships.


However, I decided I might as well build settlements on some of the land hexes John had uncovered since the numbers were rather better than anything I could do elsewhere - and it was easier for me to build ships anyway as I had no access to clay other than by trading.


John was in the lead for some time, and built settlements on some excellent locations. However he wasn't getting much access to wheat, so it was very difficult for him to build cities. For some time he had five settlements and the longest street, then he managed to build a couple of cities, meaning he could extend yet further - to make sure that Sarah's increasing trade route didn't overtake his - but it was slow going for him to attempt to get to 12 points.

Meanwhile Sarah was building wherever she could... and when she got to 11 points on the board she revealed one victory point development card which she'd bought early in the game, and was declared the winner:


So John came second with 10 points, while Richard and I both had 9. So, a good ending with all of us fairly even in points - anyone could have won. Very few development cards were bought and only a couple of knights played, so nobody claimed the largest army.