Everyone and their mother and their mother’s mother is probably familiar with the well-loved version of Catan, and since last year it has been a regular and almost religious favorite of my roommates and I, getting hours of playtime a week. Less popular, though, is the variety of expansion packs that come with it. I inherited the Seafarers Expansion pack and played it with my family for years, and then really struggled to introduce it to my roommates even though it is barely different from the original. For those who have never played it, the differences are these: there are water tiles, they are like normal tiles except they provide no resources and instead of roads you build boats to get across the small channels. There is also a water robber called the pirate, and he also works the same as the robber normally does. That’s it. I personally loved it – it made the colonization backstory all the more believable and led to different and crazy forms of expansion that were previously unavailable. I love the video game Civilization VI, and this expansion of the original Catan made it super duper similar to this video game. I thought it was unfortunately isolating, though, and I think this is why it was not popular with my roommates. It sort of demanded a certain devotion to a particular strategy, that being to win you have to really devote to boat expansion or developing a very specific portion of the map, and the well-loved parallel competition for hexes and crossover expansions seemed to lessen with this expansion pack. Everyone just sort of put their heads down and built boats or really hunkered down on their island and it was… well… like being all alone on an island.
Excitingly, for Christmas, I also got the Cities and Knights expansion. Let me say this: if Seafarers is the easy to play, fun-loving expansion for people who like the game, Cities and Knights is the hard-to-learn extremely dice-rollingly complicated war-focused version of the game for people who hate the original version of Catan. My largest qualm with the expansion is how far it is from the original game and the totally poor war mechanics it tries to introduce. It’s super complicated for no reason and strays from the little realism that the game had to begin with. The fighting mechanics are just bad, to be totally honest, and I feel entitled to say that because I play a lot of grand strategy games and they all have their own diverse set of fighting mechanics, all plausible for a board game but also fairly simple to use. What was nice, though, was the fact that the expansion demands A LOT of player interaction and even collaboration. If one player is over-expanding or over-powered, the other players can effectively collaborate to limit them or to just curb their expansion, wealth, or growth more so than the basic game. I fear this version will never be particularly well loved by me or my peers, though, for its absurd complications and its lack of quickness, as what used to be a night where we could sometimes play two games became one night where we were hoping and playing tp just learn the rules of the expansion pack. Excitingly, I have also just gotten the ‘Settlers of America’ version of the game, mimicking when the settlers first came to America, and while perhaps a little insensitive in concept, I look forward to playing it and then perhaps reviewing it in the future.
-Spencer O’Brien
