Board Game - Catan: Seafarers (Expansion)

The game "Seafarers" is not a standalone game. It can only be played together with the original game "Settlers"!

“Seafarers” is a large expansion to the popular game "Catan: Settlers". It will captivate players with battles against pirates, forming new trade agreements, and searching for gold mines. Players will be tasked with building the Wonder of Catan and much more. Discover your "Catan: Settlers" in a new way!

In the new edition of the expansion, the wonder cards have been replaced with tokens, and the design of the rules and box has also been slightly updated.

Catan is already almost completely covered with a crust of roofs, greenery from agricultural plots. The forests and mountains have long been explored and are safe, barges float on the rivers, and trade caravans travel the roads. But the blood of the settlers has not cooled, the soul craves adventure, and the heart longs for the horizon.

"Settlers: Seafarers" is one of those expansions that truly increases the area of the playing field. In the base game, we had an equilateral hexagonal field with a side of three hexes, but now the field has stretched out both horizontally and vertically (4x5, and eight instead of five hexes "along the equator"). Due to the increased number of hexes, the unpredictability of how the game board will unfold in each specific game has grown. Of course, many of the scenarios presented in the game provide a strict scheme for laying out the hexes, but free creativity from the players is not prohibited: the 9th scenario in the collection is not a scenario at all, but simply a suggestion to lay out the hexes randomly. Only the main interest comes not from the usual "random" layout but specifically from the "Seafarers" scenarios with a clear scheme for placing hexes and, more importantly, with additional rules.

In "Seafarers", the innovations in the rules are divided into two levels. There are rules common to each scenario that employs this expansion, and there are "private" rules that only work in specific scenarios, often involving special components.  

There are only a few general rules. Firstly, these are the rules for building ships and creating sea routes with ships, along with an improvement to the "Longest Trade Route" rule, now considering sea sections of the route. Secondly, a new landscape called "gold-bearing river" has been added to the family of hexes, a sort of joker, allowing the player to take cards of any resource. Finally, a pirate has entered the game – a sea robber with his own movement rules and principles of plundering. By the way, if a scenario has both a robber and a pirate, they will bother the players individually: when the fateful "seven" comes up on the dice, the player can either drive the land robber out of his possessions to the lands of an opponent or chase the pirate away from his sea routes to foreign ones, but both bandits cannot act simultaneously.

There are as many private rules as there are scenarios: let's take a look at the assortment of scenarios that Klaus Teuber has offered us.

The scenarios stretch along the standard storyline: in "New Shores", the settlers explore the coastal waters of Catan, discovering the first gold-bearing rivers, while with each new scenario they venture further away from the shores they have come to know.

The second scenario "Four Islands" pits players against each other in a competition for the development of the archipelago: each player has their own starting position, and all have equal chances of victory.

"Misty Island" entertains players in its own way: a lion's share of the game space will only be filled with hexes as player ships approach the edge of explored waters.

The scenario "Through the Desert" complicates the selection of starting positions for players: many attractive lands lie either on small southern islands or in the north beyond an extensive desert.

"The Forgotten Tribe" is a race for bonuses: villages founded by the first "pre-Catan" wave of settlers on the islands of the archipelago grant players additional victory points or development cards and reveal new harbors.

"The Riches of Catan" develops the theme of communication with neighbors: now it's important not only to develop your settlements but also to trade with villages.

But here, on the freshly obtained riches of Catan's merchants, greedy pirates pounce: the scenario "Pirate Island" is dedicated to organizing a defense against the intrusion of the buccaneers.

When the war recedes, the settlers strive to capture victory in grand constructions: the most costly scenario "Wonders of Catan" requires players to spend resources on erecting colossal monuments to the grandeur of the new nation.

Each scenario is beautiful and interesting in its own way, each requires its own tactics and strategy, and, if time allows, the board game "Settlers" with the "Seafarers" expansion can be played in campaign mode.

In conclusion, one can only express gratitude to Klaus Teuber for such development of the "Settlers" idea. The plot background may be a secondary factor for a board game, but often economic games lack precisely the atmosphere, the presence of a world in the game, to maintain old fans and attract new ones. While these eight scenarios did not place Catan and its surrounding archipelagos on the map of the world, they enriched its story, making the island more real. Now we know that this world lives, grows, and develops, meaning that many discoveries are still ahead! To your places, weigh anchor! 

Components:  

• - 30 landscape hexes
•  - 6 sea frame pieces
• - 61 plastic figures
• - 10 number tokens
• - 10 harbor tokens
• - 57 Catan tokens
• - 5 wonder cards / construction costs
• - Game rules

Game duration: from 75 minutes
Number of players: from 3 to 4