Firstly, we each had six knights, in colours matching our regular pieces. At least, three of us did. Richard played red, as usual; I played orange, Becky white. But Daniel wanted to play with the brown pieces, and brown is one of the extension colours. So he used brown cities, settlements and road, and blue knights.
Here is my set of knights:
The board is set up rather differently too. No rivers or fish this time, but one extra hex that replaces one of the wood/forest hexes. It's called the 'castle' hex, and goes in one corner of the grid:
In the opposite corner goes the desert. Then the rest of the hexes are shuffled and distributed randomly... but the numbers have to be placed as shown in the booklet. This is so that there is one of each number in the outer (coastal) hexes. Those are where the invading barbarians can be placed.
Here are a few of the barbarians:
And here are the new development cards for this game, which replace the usual ones:
No monopolies or road-building; the majority are knight-placement cards, with one or two that allow knights to be moved.
So - after twenty minutes reading the rules, and setting the game up - we finally got started. Initial placement is as in regular Settlers of Catan, except that the second placement is a city rather than a settlement. As in the Cities and Knights game. That's to enable the game to get going more quickly, since buying cards is more important in this game than in others, so as to build knights to defeat invading barbarians.
We didn't really know what strategy to use for our initial placement, so basically opted for what we would choose in a regular game. Richard placed first AGAIN - it seems to be a trend at present - but as the rest of us were sitting in different places, I was second rather than last. Becky was last, and managed to get a very nice set of numbers and resources, as did Daniel. I was quite pleased with mine, too. Richard's numbers were probably the least useful.
Oh, and the last thing to do in the setup phase was to place a barbarian on each of the outer 2 and 12 hexes.
We had decided to play with dice for resource production, rather than Catan event cards, to make it as simple as possible.
It wasn't long before Becky built her first city. The buying of any settlement or city is a prompt for barbarians to appear in Catan. So after she bought it, she had to roll the dice several times. The aim is to come up with three different numbers, excluding 7 - re-rolling repeatedly, if necessary, to get the three different ones. Barbarians are then placed on the corresponding outer hexes.
She rolled 5, 8 and 9, and so we put barbarians on the relevant hexes:
Richard was the first person to buy a development card, which enabled him to place his first knight. It has to start on one of the paths surrounding the castle hex in the corner, but can then be moved up to three paths at the end of the turn. So he moved his to the 12-sheep hex where he had a city, and where the initially placed barbarian still stood:
Then Becky bought a card, and also placed a knight. And since we wanted to see how the barbarian conquering would go, she moved her knight also to the 12-sheep hex.
At the end of someone's turn, a battle occurs on any hex where there are any barbarians, if there are more knights adjoining it than barbarians on the hex. So at the end of Becky's turn, that battle took place.
If both knights had belong to the same player, that person would have captured the barbarian (worth half a victory point). Since there were knights of different colours, Richard and Becky each rolled a die, and the one who rolled higher (Richard, in this instance) took the barbarian into captivity. Becky had a compensation prize of three Catan coins.
Yes, there are also cardboard coins in this game, although Daniel found some real old coins which we used instead. Two Catan coins can be used to buy a resource card. Up to two can be bought in any turn.
After the barbarians are removed, a die has to be rolled one more time, and placed on the castle hex. A two was rolled. That means that any knights on the battleground which are on corresponding paths have to be removed too - in this case, it was Richard's knight that had to be removed from the board. However, that also gives three Catan coins in compensation.
The regular part of the game was continuing rather more slowly than usual. Becky managed to build several streets, which effectively blocked a building spot I had hoped to use, and also gave her the longest street card:
Becky and Richard both had cities adjoining the 9-wheat hex, so the next battle against a barbarians took place there:
Since there were two player involved (even though Becky had two knights), and two barbarians, they simply took one each into captivity. So now Richard had two captured barbarians, and thus an extra solid victory point.
The next battle involved three of us on the 5-wood hex. So we each had to roll a die, and the two highest took a barbarian, while the third gained Catan coins:
At first we did quite well with vanquishing the barbarians, but settlements and cities were being built fairly regularly, and each time the dice had to be rolled, to enable more barbarians to land on Catan.
And so, before long, the 9-wheat hex had three barbarians on it, and was vanquished. The number was turned upside down, and no more resources were produced by it, until such time as four knights could gather to conquer the barbarians.
The same thing happened on the other side of the board. Becky was not too happy, since each one adjoined one of her cities. She now had nowhere that would produce wheat for her:
I was so interested in taking photos of the various battles that took place that I quite forgot about taking whole-board pictures. There didn't seem much point, since none of us had actually built all that much, at least compared to a regular Settlers game. However, barbarians were being captured fairly rapidly, so we had to keep track of those. The booklet said we should play to 12 points, so we thought we might play to 14... however, it was getting late, and we ran of out barbarians to place. So as Becky had 11 points - including the longest street and several captured barbarians - we thought it would be best to play to 12 as usual.
And here's the winning board:
Becky had twelve points, although there were only six on the board. Two for the longest street, and four from her eight captured barbarians.
Slightly to my surprise, when we counted up I realised that I had 11 points, so was also potentially close to winning. Indeed, if Becky hadn't, I was going to build another city on my turn, which would have given me 12 points. I had eight on the board, and six captured barbarians.
Richard and Daniel were both a bit further behind.
We weren't sure that we liked this scenario as much as others in the Traders and Barbarians set, but it was certainly different, and worth trying again some time.
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