Die Sternenfahrer von Catan

From: Rio Grande List Price: $56 Players: 2-4 Playing Time: 90-150 minutes  Type of game: Family Strategy Skill level: 4 Complexity: 6  Reviewed by: Dan Blum, Issue 23, April 2000

Die Sternenfahrer von Catan (The Starfarers of Catan) is one of Klaus Teuber's latest releases in the ever-expanding Settlers franchise. This game takes some of the familiar Settlers mechanics, mixes them with new ones, and drops the whole thing into a new outer-space setting, with gorgeous components. The plastic spaceships used to track players' holdings are retro models about eight inches tall, with slots on them to snap in various accessories (such as guns and engines). They also contain colored balls which determine spacecraft movement (you shake your ship and see what balls come out, in Ab die Post/Inkognito fashion). The ships are very cool and really overproduced— I hate to think how much they added to the cost of the game, and while they make it fairly easy to track everyone's upgrades, some less gaudy method could have been used.

The rest of the components are less flashy, but nice nonetheless. You get a bunch of plastic bits to snap onto the ships, plastic colonies, trading bases, starports, and (small) ships for each player (the only wood pieces in the game are the scoring markers - sacrilege), the usual commodity cards (with new artwork, of course), alien trader cards, a deck of rather large encounter cards, cardboard chits, and a board.  The plastic bits are well enough done. The cards and board feature artwork from the redoubtable

Franz Vohwinkel and are generally very nice (although the different types of planet, analogous to the hex types in standard Settlers, are not as easy to tell apart as they could be). Everything gets packaged in a box similar to the standard Kosmos Settlers box but much deeper. You definitely get your money's worth from the game in terms of components, even if some of them are overdone. But what about the gameplay?

The core mechanisms of the game are pure Settlers. Everyone sets up their starting locations (three instead of the more usual two), takes starting commodities, and begins rolling the dice. Production is handled just as in Settlers, except that if you have fewer than 9 victory points (game is 15), you get a free random card on your turn. Your raw material cards can be traded to other players or used to build ships and upgrades (there are no cards to buy).

Where things start to get different is in the movement phase. In this game, when you buy a colony you don't just plop it down where you want it— instead, you build a colony ship, and have to move it to the system you want to settle in (where you can look at the face-down production chits, and decide whether to stay there or move on). After the build phase you shake your big plastic ship and see how far you get to move your ships on the board (extra engines will add to your movement). This adds some interest

to the game in the form of races to see who gets to a site first, and seeing whether or not your gambles on the red production chits (many of which are nasty and require many upgrades before you can settle next to them) pay off. However, having to move the ships around also adds considerably to the length of the game— it can easily take three or four turns to move a ship to a new colony site (after the first one), and during that time you don't get any benefit from the colony which you spent all those cards on.

The ship movement phase also adds events. Whenever you get a black ball on your movement shake, you get an event card (this happens about 50% of the time). Most of the event cards are little "choose your own adventure" narratives, with one or two decisions for the player to make (and sometimes, a "shake-off" between the player's ship and one of the opponents'). Two of them cause the deck to be reshuffled and penalize people with many upgrades.

The event deck is an interesting idea— it adds flavor to the gamewith its little descriptions, and it makes the game a little less static. However, the execution is somewhat flawed. There are several cards for each basic “storyline” (meeting traders, being attacked by pirates, etc.). All open identically, and it's possible for any of the available choices to be the right one. This has the no doubt intended effect of making it impossible to play the events perfectly by memorizing the cards (though one could still card-count up until the deck gets reshuffled), but it also turns the events into crapshoots - if you have four possible choices, and know that each of them could have any possible outcome, you might as well roll a die. Decision-making is pretty much limited to avoiding encounters with pirates unless you have lots of guns and engines on your ship.

This wouldn't be all that bad if it weren't for two additional factors. First, resolving the events just takes too long, even if you have translations pasted on the cards or have made a new English deck (if you have to look them up, it'll take even longer). Second, some of the cards give out rewards that are just way too good to be given out randomly (moving one of your ships anywhere on the board instantly, for example). When these get evenly distributed, the game goes well enough (although it doesn't seem to go much faster, oddly enough). When they're not, whoever gets more has a big advantage.

The other big new mechanism in the game revolves around the alien traders. There are four alien races, each with a trading station on the edge of the board. Each station has five spots for trading outposts, which are built by the players much like colonies (at a different cost), and have to be shipped out to the stations on ships. Whoever has the most ships at a station gets a big chip worth two victory points (ties go to the player arriving first). Every time you place a ship at a station you also get to take one of the improvement cards from the appropriate race. The races specialize - one has production improvements (giving you a single extra commodity of a specific type when you produce it— the closest you'll get to Settlers-style cities in this game), one has trade improvements (2-1 ports, essentially), one has extra guns and engines for your ship, and one has special abilities (such as holding extra cards in your hand when a 7 is rolled, or getting charity resource cards if your score is lower than someone else's).

I like the traders mechanism well enough. The victory-point award for them can make it worth going to a station even if you don't want any of the cards (you may not need any extra guns or engines from the blue aliens, but since they're the least-visited group, it's pretty easy to pick up and keep the 2 VPs at their station). Conversely, the cards can make it worth going to a station even if you can't hope to get the victory points. However, there's a certain zing lacking from the whole affair.

Ultimately, that's how I feel about the entire game. Much of what's here works acceptably, but in a tired, ho-hum sort of way. It's hard to get excited about anything except the event cards, which are interesting precisely because they're so random. Unfortunately, their randomness doesn't really mitigate the tediousness of much of the game or shorten it much. This game is long— 2 hours or more, which is perfectly fine for some games but is much longer than I care to be playing something this chance-riddled. I'm ready for it to be done after an hour, but unfortunately at that point the end is nowhere in sight.

So, is there any way to tweak the game to run more quickly? The obvious solution that presents itself is to lower the number of victory points needed to win the game. I haven't tried this, but suspect it won't work that well— the game definitely has a beginning, middle, and end game, with the beginning being a relatively quick expansion, the middle a long period of slow growth and upgrading, and the end game being a quick surge of expansion as a sort of critical mass is reached. Lowering the VP total will make the game end during the middle, which will probably be less than thrilling. A better idea might be to increase the movement rolls— maybe count a black ball as a 4 and eliminate the events, which in itself would speed the game up a fair amount.

In the end, though, even if the game could be played in an hour or so I still don't think I'd want to play it very often. It just doesn't add enough interesting new things to the standard Settlers mechanisms. If I want to play Settlers (not something that happens all that often, anyway), I'd rather play the original game, Nuremburg, or maybe a historical scenario—these last two add new mechanisms to Settlers which actually require some new and different decisions to be made. Starfarers just doesn't have enough of that. Final analysis: big sizzle, overcooked steak.