I bought the Fishermen of Catan expansion on a whim. How badly wrong can you go for $4? Don’t answer that; I already know, because I already bought the Settlers of Catan River expansion for $3 about a year ago.
The expansions are superficially similar; they carry the Catan label, but they’re really little more than minor variants reading like someone’s clever house rules, nothing like the major revamps of Settlers of the Stone Age or Knights and Cities. And, of course, they cost a pittance. But there’s a world of difference in enjoyment.
The river variant replaces three hexes of the game board with a three-hex line depicting a river spilling from a central mountain to a coastal swamp in one corner of the board. Building roads or settlements/cities in contact with this river tile earn an extra third of a point, and fractions are rounded down. Building on the isolated coastal point of the swamp—otherwise useless, as the swamp produces nothing, and no port abuts it—earns an entire extra point, for taking advantage of the alluvial gold to be found there. (The gold only earns this point; do not confuse it with the gold tiles of other expansions.)
Nobody in my group liked it much. Admittedly, their opinion might be colored by the 10-5-4-4 massacre that resulted, but all the river does is award an extra point or two for developing certain locations intensively. And because those locations are relatively unproductive, one could safely give them a low priority. There’s no novel decisions to be made, no surprising alterations to the basic Catan strategies, just the serendipitous award of an extra point if you happen to be in the right spot at the right time. (I earned three points by settling almost the entirety of the river, but that can’t be the normal course of things. My opponents all ignored it entirely, and I only settled the river as heavily as I did because that’s where my opponents weren’t.) The $3 wasn’t much of a loss, but I feel cheated out of time that could have been spent on a satisfying old-school Catan game.
The fishing variant turns non-port sea tiles into fisheries; on the right roll, villages earn a random fish token from a pool and cities earn two tokens. (Fish tokens do not count as resources for theft and hand limits, but may be traded.) With one exception, the fish tokens are worth one, two, or three fish, so you can’t know for sure just how much fish power a player might have until he uses it. For a cost of 2-7 fish, you can enjoy a special privilege, ranging from returning the robber to the wasteland all the way up to drawing a development card. The exceptional fish token is the old boot. Whoever holds it must earn one more point than normal to win, but because it can be passed to anyone with at least as many points as the current owner, it quickly gets handed to the leader and stays in his hand, a nearly permanent 1-point handicap to whomever is ahead.
This went over much better with my group. I didn’t like the boot, myself, but perhaps that’s because I win often, and got stuck with the boot the entire game…and ended up losing for it. I did like the other fish effects, despite suffering from them, so I hope my opinion isn’t too poisoned by personal difficulty. Roughly speaking, and on the average, a fish token is worth as much as any other resource card; spending fish in place of other resources is ever-so-slightly more expensive, but also slightly more flexible. If anything, fish are slightly better than resource cards because they can’t be stolen, and the fisheries produce on common rolls, 4-10. I didn’t care for the way fisheries flattened the board, turning all areas into productive bonanzas and removing a sense of geographic value from the board, but the increased variety of ways to control the action were worth the weakening of some of the fine balance of the original Catan. Or rather, worth it while they remain new and interesting. And definitely worth the $4.
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