- It's a pretty vicious game... between the Arsonist, the Spy & the Black Knight, you can do some serious damage to your opponent.
- It's a memory game... to play well, you need to keep track of which of five decks certain key cards are hiding. If you don't like memory games, this is NOT for you.
- It runs just a tad long until you've played it a number of times... your first game will run 2 - 2.5 hours with subsequent plays finally reaching the 90 min. mark.
Everything including the kitchen sink... but with special attention paid to board games, Jesus Christ, my family, being a "professional" (and I use that word loosely) Christian, and the random firing of the 10% of the synapses I'm currently using.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
The Unofficial Guide To Catan, Part 2
As promised, here's the second installment of my "Unofficial Guide to Catan." (You can read the first installment here.) This time around, we'll deal with all the spin-off games.
Settlers of Catan: The Card Game
I bought this game & El Grande 10 years ago at Gamescape in San Francisco... both of them chock full of German text. Now, in the enlightened days when so many European games are re-published in English, it may seem hard to believe, but we played a lot of this game (10-20 plays) using the German cards & cheat sheets to look up the translations.
The Settlers Card Game takes the same basic "build settlements to harvest resources" mechanic from the original game and builds on it, adding knights, buildings w/special powers, fleets, action cards & event cards. Take it from me - there's a lot of game in here & a number of ways to pursue victory. This game is for two players, however, so there is very little trading. (Well, trading is allowed in the rules, but it is very seldom used.)
I'm a huge fan of the game, but I need to sound three warnings for those who are interested:
You might have missed a couple Mark, although Mayfair/Kosmos calls them Catan:Adventures, I can see if you considered, and then discounted them since their base mechanics are a bit non-'catanish'. These would be Elasund:The First City and Candamir: The First Settler. In one way it's kind of like Catan and Cities and Knights... Candamir is mostly solitare, with IMO about as much interaction as base Catan, and Elasund is like C&K with much hosage possible.
ReplyDeleteBob, did you read the whole thing?! They're in the post!
ReplyDeleteCandamir gets a C+, Elasund gets a B+...
I'da sworn I posted this after reading part 1. I admit I haven't read part two at the time. Odd. Oh well, I see you covered the subject quite throughly.
ReplyDeleteOn a different note it is a bit freaky to see a much grown Braeden.
The world moves on, I stay still.