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From:Kosmos
Cost: $48
Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 60-90 minutes
Type of game: Family Strategy
Skill level: 5
Complexity: 3
Reviewed by: Peter Sarrett, Issue 6.2 (22), January 2000
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As long as we’re on the subject of scenarios for Settlers of Catan, let’s talk about Die Siedler von Nurmburg. Created to celebrate the 500th birthday of the city of Nuremburg, I’m told the game is available just about everywhere within the city walls. Americans familiar with local customized Monopoly sets will understand where and how these things are being sold. They’re also available through a very few select German game store chains, and Funagain has imported some to the United States.
Strictly speaking this isn’t a scenario but a complete game unto itself with everything you need to play. Which means most people will be paying for settlement and road pieces they already own. Like the Historical Scenarios the game is played on a fixed map with preprinted number values, so we’re pretty much in scenario territory here despite the standalone price tag. As in earlier scenarios, designer Klaus Teuber has tinkered with the basic recipe, removing some ingredients and replacing them with entirely new ones while maintaining the essence of the original game. The result is a scenario with lots of new flavors that should satisfy those whose palettes have grown tired of the same old same old.
The first thing you’ll notice about the game board is that it’s divided into two sections. The right half shows the resource hexes familiar to Settlers players, this time depicting the countryside surrounding Nuremburg. The left half gives us a close-up of the city itself and provides areas for building workshops, walls, and towers as well as price charts for producing finished goods like armor and paper.
Five roads emerge from the Nuremburg hex on the outdoor map and wind through the countryside. Two of them lead into the wilderness, while the other three lead to Prague, Frankfurt, or Venice. Since the game’s roads are already built, players instead build toll booths. Toll booths look and cost the same as a basic Settlers road, but are always placed as close to Nuremburg as possible along the road of the builder’s choice. Once a player has a toll booth on a road, he can build settlements anywhere along that road. The bonus for the longest road is consequently replaced by five toll bonuses, claimed by the player with the most toll booths on each road.
Perhaps the most interesting variation introduced in this scenario, and certainly the one which has been most often discussed since Settlers’ original release, is the elimination of dice. They’re replaced by a deck of 36 event cards- one card for each possible outcome of a pair of dice. Every Settlers player has bemoaned the luck of the dice, complaining that eights came up like gangbusters right until they built their settlement on one, or marveling that threes have come up far more than is statistically probable. The idea behind the deck of cards is to produce a more natural bell curve, eliminating absurd strings of improbable rolls.
A true bell curve isn’t guaranteed, however. In addition to a number, most cards also trigger a special event. Three cards cause a marker to be advanced along a timeline. When the last such card appears, the deck is immediately reshuffled (and if the marker reaches the end of the timeline, the game ends immediately). The deviation from the bell curve depends on when those three cards appear. The deck works well, but warps players’ strategies. Everyone knows exactly how many times each number is in the deck. Once all the fours have appeared, for example, establishing a settlement on a 4 hex becomes far less attractive until after the reshuffle. And of course the robber tends to go elsewhere. I think I’d be happier if there was a fourth reshuffle card in the deck, still shuffling after the third appears. Perhaps I’m just used to the unfettered, fickle randomness of the dice. Players who dislike Settlers because of that fickleness should be more comfortable here.
There’s no development deck in this scenario, which means you can’t buy a knight card to chase the robber away. The robber only moves on a 7 or on a “margrave intervenes” event I missed the ability to buy cards quite a bit. Not just for the benefits those cards bestow, but because they provide another use for wheat. Of the ten things you can buy in Nurmburg, wheat can be used for only two of them. Getting a lot of wheat is therefore only useful if you’re also getting a lot of ore (for workshops) or if you’ve got the wheat port.
There are no cities in this scenario. Instead, for the same cost, players can build workshops on the city map. Depending on where they’re placed, a workshop gives a player a 2:1 or 3:1 port, the ability to build towers, or the ability to sell specific goods for double the normal price.
Finished goods (paper, armor, etc) are abstract concepts in the game- they don’t physically exist. When a player buys one, he immediately sells it at Venice, Prague, or Frankfurt (depending on the good) for gold, some of which he must pay to the player with the toll bonus for the road leading to that city. Sometimes this means another player actually makes more money off your sale than you do! Gold is needed to build walls and towers, and can be converted 4:1 into other resources. Obviously, you’d prefer to traffic in goods destined for cities for which you have the corresponding toll bonus, and you‘d rather get double the price for them. The battle for some toll bonuses can be fierce, and there’s usually a race to establish workshops on prime locations.
The final twist to this scenario. the construction of walls and towers, is similar to building the pyramid in the Cheops scenario. Anyone can build a wall to earn one prestige point. More expensive towers earn two prestige points but can only be built from certain workshops. The top three prestige holders earn council seats worth 4, 3, and 2 victory points. These seats change hands as totals shift but get locked in at twelve prestige points. In the games I’ve played players pursued prestige only in the endgame, reaching 3 or 4 prestige to grab the 4 point seat and win. Others have reported games in which the battle for prestige has been hotter, climbing all the way to the twelve point ceiling.
A subtlety often overlooked until too late is that with no cities to replace settlements, each player is limited to no more than five resource-producing locations. Choose them wisely. Since you need only one toll to build anywhere along a road, getting to your desired spot is easy. But it’s easy for everyone.
Nurmburg presents players with a multitude of fronts, and the winner is the player who chooses and times his battles carefully. Given the amount of space it occupies there’s less action on the city map than I expected.