inconsequential ruminations

[Settlers Book]: The Colonists

My interest in Settlers of Catan was rekindled last night. We played the Colonists scenario for Settlers of Catan from the Settlers Book. I got the Settlers Book a while ago, because it was on offer at German Amazon. It was only £10 and last night it paid for itself. It almost felt like a new game.

The Colonists uses a similar theme to several of the basic Seafarers scenarios. There is a cramped base island and an undiscovered area, called the colonies, a boat ride away, which has richer pickings. There are two big twists. Firstly, there are no sea routes. Instead players use their ship pieces as actual ships, traveling on the intersections of hexes, which ferry goods and discover new islands. They move the speed of the highest die number in the resource roll, for instance a roll of 4,2 means all a player’s ships move four intersections. It is an interesting thematic shift, which actually works better than basic Seafarers. I always though this was the way Seafarers should have been designed in the first place. Secondly, the resources gathered from the colonies are not resource cards, but instead are colony chits, which can only be cashed in once they are brought back to the home island with your ships.

There are several land types in the colonies:

• Desert – creates gems. Two are worth one action card.
• Jungle – creates discoveries. Three are worth one victory point. I find it hard to believe that it is coincidence that the chits look like marijuana plants and the jungle looks like field of those plants. Naturally, we called them weed.
• Ore field – creates ore. One is worth one ore.
• Gold field – creates gold. One is worth one of any resource card, except for ore.
• Volcano – creates one of any chit above, but if it produces, the settlement is destroyed in a 1/6 chance.

The pirate can steal his choice of colony chits from ships or settlments – there is no robber. The ore chits in particular are very valuable, because there is only one ore hex on the home island and it only pays on a roll of 2. The pirate also blocks ships, so ships have to go further to return goods to land. You can defend by buying an expensive War Fleet, which protects the six intersections around a hex from the pirate.

The lack of ore meant a few changes. No development cards were bought in the game with resource cards, they only came from desert gems. No ore was ever traded between players. Two for one ports became very valuable later in the game. Also, cities cannot be built in the colonies, which means that there was a shortage. This with the lack of ore, meant the game took much longer than regular seafarers. Our game took 3.5 hours, not including a long time for setup. This might come down with further plays, especially if someone can organise a solid shipping network, but is an obstacle. We will probably try racing to 11 victory points, instead of 13.

One oddity is that Rick Heli’s translation said there was a problem with the board layout picture, but we could not see it and it worked perfectly with our Mayfair set.

We will definitely play this again, which is more than I can say for the other Settlers variants I have tried. I actually think that in some ways this version is superior to regular Settlers, because the thematic changes make the game more natural. My only complaint is the long duration, but I am confident we can bring it down.

Richard Heli has published an interview with Mikko Saari. It is good to put a face and context to the writing.