Never give up, never trade all your resources!

Or something like that!

This time we’re going to look at a new game I picked up at a recent convention I attended, RoundCon.

I’ve had the Settlers from Catan for years and love the little game.  It’s fast, simple, and a blast to play.  I’ve had my eye on one of it’s successors for a while now, Starfarers from Catan!

In Starfarers the play is very similar to the original Catan with a few interesting changes.  First the basics:  You roll dice to see what generates resources each turn based on numbers on chips on each of the resource generating locations.  You use these resources to build things.  In the original Catan you built cities and roads.  In Starfarers you build expansions to your ships, colonies, spaceports, and trading posts.  The general idea is the same: you want to be the first to garner fifteen victory points in order to win the game.  In Settlers victory points were counted from cities and towns as well as some ‘prize-like’ victory points for having the largest standing army (special cards you could buy) or the longest contiguous road.  Starfarers counts colonies and space ports but also introduces some extra competition in the form of the trading system with the alien races further away from the starting planets.  The player with the most trading posts around a particular trader gets that race’s friendship token.  These tokens are worth two victory points each!  Also you can, using the wonderful event system in the game, gain fame rings on your ship to indicate heroic deeds accomplished.  Every two fame rings grants another victory point.  You gain and lose favor with the traders and gain and lose fame rings leading to an enjoyable dynamic experience.

As a two player game it was fun but by adding more it can only get better.  As just two players the universe became divided rather quickly and after I took three of the four traders through a bit of luck and speed the game was concluded.  With more players the struggle to maintain control of the traders would be more heated and the game would last longer.  Still, that’s just taking a great cake and adding icing.  And who doesn’t like icing?  Someday I might pick up the expansion that adds two more max players (right now it caps at four players) but I hardly ever get a large gaming group together these days with my time constraints.  Those acquainted with my other site, Falling Leaves, are already aware of the little leisure time I can afford between work and school so I won’t dwell on it here.

The summary here is that the game, Starfarers of Catan is well made and dynamic enough for repeated playing.  While the four player base set maximum is somewhat constraining it does not hold back on any of the spacey fun the game presents.  Live long and build ship expansions.