Geek Syndicate Issue 5 | Page 63

Geek Syndicate
(between 2 and 12) represents which planet “produces” and the player who has a Starbase on that planet gets the resources (whether it’s their turn or not). Resources can be traded to other players, to the “bank” via ports on the edge of the board, or spent to build supply routes and more starbases. The aim of the game, simply put, is to accumulate resources, build starbases and supply routes. Points are scored based on how many bases and routes that you have. There are a few additional wrinkles; a marauding Klingon counter can block planets from producing and make you discard cards and points can be scored from special cards, by having the longest supply route and a couple of other ways as well. Finally, each player gets a special action card based on one of the Original Star Trek Characters featuring a minor, but possibly game-winning, change to the rules (often a free resource swap). These latter items are the only major change from “Classic” Settlers of Catan and seem a fun and not significantly game-breaking addition to the rules. That may sound complicated, but I have in essence just explained the entire rules of the game in two paragraphs and that is part of Catan’s great beauty. Within a full turn around all the players you’ll have a grasp of most of the game’s mechanics and within a couple of games you’ll have most of the tactics fully understood. It’s a simple game with enormous depth and replayability. Best of all it is not intimidating or difficult to learn. I’ve played this with a six year old, and they needed a bit of help with the tactics but certainly had little problem understanding the game itself.
Image © Mayfair Games, 2012

So, back to the two big questions we started with. First, is this a good game? Yes. It’s a great game. It may be mostly a “reskin” of Settlers of Catan but if you don’t own Settlers of Catan you could do a lot worse than owning this version. It’s well produced, good to look at and easy to play. Onto the second question of how it compares to “Classic” Settlers. This is a bit harder. Obviously, there are some minor changes but they don’t seem to majorly affect the game play, so I’m forced to conclude that if you already own Settlers of Catan, it would be a lot of money to pay for a new version because aside from all the tiny plastic spaceships you could ever want it’s not bringing a lot to the table. In some ways, I’m pleased about that though because I think that destroying with change what makes Settlers great would be a very foolish thing to do. So in conclusion – whilst this may be a superfluous purchase if you already own Settlers of Catan, this is a fun and wellproduced version of a classic modern board game, and if you don’t own a copy, this is certainly a version worth getting.

This latter point is key: Catan is an entry point to the sort of board games that are beyond Monopoly or Mousetrap and one of things that makes it so is that you are not directly competing with other players. You can’t attack them or take things off them, you can’t destroy their Starbases and Supply Lanes. The worst you can do is place the Klingons on one of the worlds they have a Base on, but even that isn’t that bad and it can be moved on pretty easily. If you were feeling really aggressive you could build a Supply Route where they wanted to, but this is a game of building your own network faster than everyone else, not a game of slowing other people down. It makes it friendly and fun, and in most games you end up helping each other to make the best decisions you can with your resources. Which is pretty much in the spirit of Star Trek, when you think about it.

Matt Farr
Rating:

GGGGG
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