inconsequential ruminations

Last night four of us played the Transportsiedler scenario from the Settlers Book.

It is basically Seafarers of Catan but instead of ships representing sea routes, they represent individual ships carrying goods from Catan to two smaller islands laden with ore and gold. This always seemed to me like a obviously good idea for a scenario. You generate goods on your islands separately, so you have to ship to the new islands to build there. Also, ship transport is risky, because there is a fast marauding pirate.

Despite the great premise, it was not a great experience. Unfortunately the PDF rules do not include Rick Heli’s, note on the original translation:

Additional Note: Since the Robber Baron is not in this scenario, and since there is no “hand” of cards per se, I wondered whether it is still true that a roll of “7” causes a player to lose half his cards should he hold 8 or more. I wrote to and received a reply from Stefan Otte of Kosmos Verlag. The German text of it is below, but the gist is that if a player has more than seven cards at all of his locations, he must indeed still discard as usual. However, he goes on to say that their recommendation is to try omitting this rule as otherwise this scenario is sometimes very difficult to play. He finishes by suggesting that one play with whichever variant seems best to the players. So apparently it’s impossible to go wrong on the issue.

From my reading of the PDF, we played with no discarding, so we had huge handfuls of cards. As getting across the sea to the new islands is dangerous, he winner was just the guy who had the 3:1 port and who shipped the least.

There are two other rules problems:

1. The turn phase order in the summary is different to the ordering of the rules. Which is correct?
2. Are warehouses built in the normal build phase? If so, ships are doubly exposed to the pirate, making the process even more tortuous. After some confusion we decided to allow warehouse building after the ship move phase.

Mik Svellov (where is he these days?) also had reservations about how well the scenario works for three.

Transport-Siedler works with 4 players only. In the 3-player game one player is able to move his goods unchallenged while the other two players compete against each other.

Stay away. I have dropped my ranking of the Settlers’ Book a notch. 7/10.