Game Review – Starfarers of Catan

Starfarers of Catan
Number of Players	3 - 4
Play Time	120 minutes
Ages	12 years and up

The game I am reviewing this week is Starfarers of Catan. 

Starfarer of Catan was the first variant addition of Settlers of Catan to come out with a board and game elements that were unique to it.  I consider it to be the prototype to the Catan Histories series.

Starfarers of Catan take place in a future where the players take the role of colonial administrators vying for the prestigious post of Ambassador to the Galactic Council.  In order to win the post, players must expand their colonies to more planets, establish trade with alien races, and overcome encounters that come up along the way.

Game play for the first half of a player’s turn is almost the same as any other Catan game.  The players role two dice and resources are distributed to the players who have colonies on the planets whose numbers come up.  One of the differences is that if a seven comes up, players loses half their resource cards if they have more than seven in their hand, and the rolling player gets to steal a resource card from another player as in Settlers of Catan, but in Starfarers there is no pirate to place.  There is also the addition of the colonial support deck, which is a deck of resource cards that the rolling player draws from on his turn.  After the resources are distributed the player may trade and build improvements.

In a normal Settlers of Catan game, the players turn would be over at this point, but in Starfarers the player moves on to the movement phase.

One of the things that Starfarers of Catan adds is that instead of just building colonies on planets, the players must move them into position after they are purchased by using ships.  One of the unique game elements to Starfarers is the mothership.  The mothership is what the players use to determine how fast they can move their ships around the board. 

At the start of the movement phase the player shakes their mother ship and two colored balls come out of the bottom of the ship.  The colors determine how fast that player’s ships mover during their turn.  If a black ball comes out then an encounter happens.  The player then needs to resolve and encounter card and depending on how strong their mothership is, this can be a difficult task.  If there is no black ball, then the player moves their ship along their path without any interference.

The mothership can be upgraded during the building phase of the game.  Its cargo space, engines, and weapons can be improved.  If any improvement is added to the mothership, it affects all of the ships that are currently on the board as well as any ships built later in the game.

Besides colony ships, the players can build trading ships.  The trading ships are used to open relations with the alien races on the board.  When a trading post is established with one of the alien races, the player chooses a gift from the alien.  The gifts provide the players with bonuses that the keep through the rest of the game.  In addition, if the player is in the dominant position in trading post with any alien race, they get a friendship token.  The token is important in that each friendship token is worth 2 victory points.

The first player to 15 points wins the game.  A player cannot with the game by only building colonies.  The players need to follow a balanced approach of both exploration and trade in order to get the victory points they need to win.

Overall I am not the biggest fan of Starfarers of Catan.  There are a number of balance issues in the encounter cards that can give a player an early advantage in the game that the other players will not be able to catch up to.

That being said, game play is smooth and easy of most people to pick up.  The game is very pretty and well made and particularly the motherships do catch the attention of people passing by.  You can see elements of it in the Catan Histories games.  There are a lot of changes between those games and Starfarers of Catan.

I recommend that if you like Catan games or are a fan of science fiction and are looking for something different than your standard 4X games, you should try Starfarers of Catan.