Geek Syndicate Issue 5 | Page 62

Geek Syndicate
BOARD GAME REVIEW

Star Trek Catan
Since 1966, millions of Star Trek® fans all over the world have watched the adventures of the Starship Enterprise, Captain Kirk, and Mr. Spock. And since 1995, millions of enthusiastic players all over the world have played Klaus Teuber’s The Settlers of Catan®—a board game classic. It’s time to bring them all together on the Final Frontier!
Image © Mayfair Games, 2012

So first, how does Star Trek: Catan actually work? Well, you open the box and you’ve a nice tray inside with storage for all your parts, cards and game tiles. As you’d expect, it’s a physically good looking product; the printing is clear and crisp, the miniatures are cleanly molded and it looks like it’s robust enough to survive a good few games without getting too tatty. The Rulebook looks pretty thin, but Catan is a game that is quick to learn, with simple rules that interact in complex ways, so you spend time learning how to win, not learning which piece goes where or moves in what way. The Board is assembled from hexagonal tiles that are shuffled and then laid out into the hexagonal board, and then six “sea” pieces are put around them in a ring to hold them altogether. Each tile represents a planet that produces a certain type of raw material, and once they’re all down they are each assigned a number in a set pattern, this mechanic helps to ensure that each board is different, but is not totally at the whim of random chance. To play the game, during each player’s turn they roll two dice, and the total on the dice
Image © Mayfair Games, 2012

Publisher: Mayfair Games

SPACE... ...the Final Frontier. The many resource rich planets within the limits of Federation territory await exploration and settlement. Build outposts and star bases to extract the resources. Using your fleet of starships, establish supply routes that enable you to boldly go further into deep space. Avoid resource shortages by trading with your opponents and Federation neighbors. If your opponents venture too far into your space, though, you might need to divert the Klingons to drive them away... because in the end, only one can be the Federation’s greatest hero! Take up the challenge! STAR TREK CATAN® transports the timeless game concept of the world’s most acclaimed board game—THE SETTLERS OF CATAN—into the exciting Star Trek universe. The popular characters of the Starship Enterprise come into play through novel new “support cards.” Build, trade and settle where no one has gone before!

On opening up Star Trek: Catan, two questions immediately leap to mind. The first is the obvious one: “Is this a good game?” and the second: “is this a good version of Settlers of Catan?” They’re very different things, and I suspect that they are applicable to very different audiences. Settlers of Catan is one of the unquestioned classics of the board gaming scene, but at the same time many people will pick up its Star Trek iteration with little prior knowledge of the gam ???????????????M??????????????????????????????????????((??((0