Tuesday 17th August - Seafarers of Catan

I can’t say the Catan series of games are my favourites being well and truly stuffed in a few of them by horrendous dice roles. Of course it could have been my bad choice of initial position for my starting settlements. Anyway on last nights menu was Seafarers of Catan. I have only played this one once before quite a while ago so can’t remember much about it. Attendees for this one were Myself, Steve, Garry and Neil. I went second after Neil so had a chance to get a decent position for my first settlement. The board for Seafarers initial placement is not very big so there’s a good chance you could be treading on somebody else’s toes from the off. I had both of my initial settlements bordering brick tiles and quite close to the brick port so I quickly built a settlement on the port. One of the tiles was a six and that quickly became a target for the robber.

As the game developed those brick tiles did enable me to generate a lot of cards, robber withstanding, Neil sailed across the sea to colonise one of the islands and Garry treked across the desert to establish an outpost there. Steve meanwhile seemed to be lagging behind a little although it was all very close. Both Garry and myself were garnering handfuls of cards and consequently dreading the robber. A couple of times we were caught out and had to discard substantial amounts of resources. Steve was quietly buying development cards and eventually got the army card, Neil had long since captured the longest road and managed to hang on to it throughout the game.

I managed to get to an island and eststablish a colony there and hoped to sail along the coast across to the next island but the pirate soon put paid to that! End game it was very tight with trading almost non-existent with everyone afraid of helping a rival to the win. Then Steve who had been behind a lot of the time managed to build an upgrade and turned over a development card VP to claim the win. Phew!! The final scores reflect the closeness of the game. Which I thoroughly enjoyed by the way.

This variant of Catan and the Stone Age one are definitely my favourites of the range. Garry suprisingly had never played any version of Catan and as this was his first game did really well even though he was in last place.

Final Scores (*denotes starting player)
*Neil 11, Colin 11, Steve 12, Garry 10

Rating (0-10)
Colin 8.5