Tuesday 21st March - Settlers of Nurnberg

Setters of Nurnberg Board
Originally uploaded by coljen.

This week Richard wanted to play one of the variations of Settlers that we hadn’t played yet. Die Siedler von Nürnberg. I must say that although the Settlers franchise is very popular with a lot of gamers I didn’t warm to it for quite a while. Having played most of the incarnations of it now I find that I do like a couple of them. Settlers of the Stone Age I think I like the best, that is until last night. The Nürnberg version is now definitely my favourite. Unlike most Settlers the board is not constructed as you go but is preconstructed. It is split into two, one half portraying the city, where you can build workshops, city walls and towers. And the countryside surrounding the city, with five roads leading away from Nürnberg. Three of these lead to other cities. You can build settlements and toll stations on this part of the board. We decided to use the set-up in the rules to place the starting settlements and toll stations.
I won’t go into the rules in depth, you can find out more on BGG, but I found the gameplay very engaging. The added element of gold and being able to manufacture goods and sell them to the other cities made it a very different game to the other Settlers I have played. For a start I have always had bad dice rolls (that’s my story anyway) in other games and the introduction of a deck of cards with numbers on seemed to even out the odds a bit. Also the events on the cards adds yet another element to consider. I managed to build a toll station on the road leading to Frankfurt, and controlled it for the whole game. Unfortunately there wasn’t a settlement on it for most of the game so I didn’t benefit from any toll fees! I did build a workshop on the wood space in the city and used this to good effect when I was able to manufacture two lots of helmets and sell them to Frankfurt for double, that would be 16 gold. I controlled the road so I didn’t have to pay a toll either. We were all on about 5-7 VPs and I could see the game rapidly escalating to an end when the council cards started to come into play. I had built a workshop in the Bauhof, which enabled me to build towers. I was planning to build one on my next turn and grab the high council card for 4vp when Steve build 2 city walls giving him the 3 prestige points necessary to snatch it. Unfortunately nobody had noticed how close Steve was to winning and this gave him a total of 13VPs, the winning total.
All in all I really enjoyed playing and hopefully will do a bit better next time. I think Steve was the only one who had played before so not surprising he burgled the win.

Final Scores
Steve 13, Richard 9, Colin 7, Garry 6