|
From: Kosmos (English edition now available from Mayfair
Cost: $13.95
Players: 2
Playing Time: 60-90 minutes
Type of game: Card
Skill level: 3
Complexity: 7
Reviewed by: Jim Musser, Issue 5.1 (17), Winter 1997
|
What do we all like about Die Siedler von Catan? Multi-player. Some players have an excess of some resources and a shortage of others, providing a natural incentive to trade. Very simple game mechanics. A different board each time we play. Short turns and a reasonably short game. Frequent decisions about how to use your resource cards best and whether to risk building up a big hand.
Well, Die Siedler von Catan: das Kartenspiel has none of those things. It's strictly two-player. There is almost never a reason to trade and very little player interaction--almost like double solitaire. Some, but not all, of the mechanics are simple, and the German language cards slow down play considerably. Essentially the same start each time. Long turns and an average game that is at least twice as long as Siedler, when you're ready for it to end in half the time. Most decisions are pretty automatic. And then there's the strong premium for a player with a good memory for where certain cards are. I'll bet you can guess that I don't do very well at memory games.
Having said all that, I'm not sorry I bought it and I actually like to play it. But if you're expecting a game that's as contagious as the original and with the replayability, expect again.
Here's how it goes. The mechanics are like the multiplayer version -- vaguely. There is no board. Each player starts with essentially the same thing--two villages, a road connecting them, and six land cards that are placed at the corners of each village. Five of the lands are those in Siedler; the sixth is gold, which is not nearly as good as it is in Seefarer, where it is essentially a wild resource, used as whatever you want. In the card game, it is essentially worthless, not used to purchase anything and tradable for other resources at 3 for 1 (as they all are). Each land has a number from a single die. The two players' land cards have different numbers (for instance, one player's grain is a 2, the other is a 1).
The other equipment consists of extra village cards (for building new ones), extra road cards, stadt cards, extra lands (you add 2 when you build a village), event cards, development cards (things you can build or things you can do), a regular die and an event die, plus two tokens that sort of serve the same purpose as the road and Ritter cards but for different achievements.
At the beginning of the game, each player places his or her villages with the road connecting them and the lands at the corners of the villages. The decision to place which land where is free, but there's really no way of knowing what's going to work best at this point. And it doesn't make much difference at all. Then the cards to be purchased and event cards are placed between the players. The development cards are shuffled into five roughly equal piles and placed between the players as well. Each player chooses one of those piles, examines it, and chooses three cards from it to form his hand.
Now here's where the memory part comes in. Players are constantly drawing from one of these piles, discarding to the bottom of one of them, and sometimes examining them without shuffling afterward. What I saw left my head almost immediately , but a player with a good memory would have to be pretty unlucky to lose to somebody like me.
Development cards come in three types -- ones with German text in green boxes, ones with German text in red boxes, and ones with German text in yellow boxes. The game would move along a lot faster if you could read German. The green ones are things you can build above and below a village (each village can accommodate two things). The symbols for the resource cost are on the card, and their special functions (from doubling production of an adjacent land to protecting resources from the bandit or allowing you to trade a given resource 2:1) are noted with easy symbols as well. The red cards are things you can build above and below a Stadt (each Stadt can accommodate four things, green or red). Symbols in dictate the building cost, but the function is only in the text, and is not always very intuitive. The yellow cards are things you can do to an opponent, to help yourself, or to protect yourself from an opponent. They cost nothing to use, are removed from the game thereafter, and are text heavy. I've made handy reference sheets for the translations. The game is slow enough already; it would be interminable if you had to reference the rules all the time.
On a player's turn, he or she rolls both dice. The number determines which resource he gets and which his opponent gets. The other die makes something else happen. Two sides indicate to draw an event card (German text in blue boxes, really non-intuitive). One side is a sun--each player gets a resource of his choice. One side is the bandit--if you have more than 7 resources, you lose all your rocks and sheep. One side is a helmet and one a windmill, which brings me to the special tokens.
Some of the green cards you can build are Knights. Whoever has the Knights of the highest total value gets the Knight token. It is worth one victory point, and whenever the helmet comes up, the player with the Knight token gets a free resource of his or her choice. Some of the green and red cards you can build have Windmill symbols, some as many as 4 Windmills. Whoever has the most total Windmill symbols gets the Windmill token, also worth one victory point. When the Windmill symbol comes up on the die, the player with the Windmill token takes the resource of his choice from the other player. Pretty potent.
Each village is one victory point, each Stadt is two. Many of the things you can build also count as one or more victory point. The game's to 12.
You know how elegant the multiplayer Siedler game is? Well, this game isn't. Some of the cards are clearly better than others, to the point where certain cards will never be used. I'm sure a better balance could have been achieved. The emphasis on memory and the needless duration of this game make it one that you pull out when you don't have enough players for something else. But at least you will play it sometimes.
Jim Musser once worked for Mayfair Games, the current American publisher of Settlers of Catan, where he oversaw the development of their edition of Cosmic Encounter. He currently works at the Chicago Tribune.