Wargame Night 05-14

On May 10th, Bob, Eric, Tim and myself got together for a slightly different game night of Settlers of Catan- Star Trek! Yes, that's right my friends, Settlers: Star Trek. This was purchased at the local Target store over a year ago and only just now did I pull it out for the guys to play.

Basically, this is the same game as your normal Settlers except the "robber" are the Klingons with a cool Klingon Warbird starting off in an asteroid field rather than the traditional desert located in the center of the star map.

Instead of roads in the old game, you get starships that ply the spaces in between the planets that serve the same purpose. Instead of settlements, you get outposts that are initially placed on the corners of each hex. And finally, instead of cities, you get starbases which serve the same purpose again. As in the old game, points are assigned to "settlements and cities" with outposts as one victory point and starbases as two victory points. Each piece on the game board has plastic clear posts to stand on and gives it more of a three dimensional feel to it.

We did find that the resources in the game were a bit difficult to compare to as they are more aligned with the Star Trek universe such as "tritanium" instead of brick or "dilithium" instead of ore and so on. Kind of confusing since we are all so used to the original game with its more simplistic design but still we had a good time with it nevertheless being the Trekkie fans that we are.

There is an added feature to the game that is totally absent in the traditional Settlers game: Federation Officers. These characters add an additional element of surprise to the game that allows the player to utilize at least twice during the game before he must discard the character and pick a new one. The characters are - Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Sulu, Checkov, Scotty, Sarek and some lesser known characters like Chapel and Rand. These officers confer abilities to each player such as allowing one to trade resources for 2:1 instead of the normal 4:1 ratio, or allowing one to look at an opponents hand of resource cards and take one from him at his expense, or giving one a chance to move the Klingon Warbird away from you and place it on another planetary system and so forth and so on.

We all agreed this was a nice feature to the game that gave this particular Settlers of Catan a leg up on the more traditional game system that seemed lacking with the older version we have been playing for some time now.

I figured we would be playing multiple games this night, so to determine the Tournament score we would add all the scores for each game and whoever had the lowest score would get first place for the night and so on.

We played a total of two games and Eric won the first game with Bob in second and Tim & I tied for third. In the second game, I got first place with Tim in second place and Bob in third place. Eric got fourth place. Thus, for the Tournament score of the night, I was able to scrape out first place with a combined total score of 4. Amazingly, and unfortunately, everyone else was able to garner second place with a combined score of 5 to each player! So, it was a good night for scoring for all players that were able to show up.

Finally, I wish to add that I feel I now have finally broken my fourth place "winning" streak! Thank the Maker! Oh wait, that's Babylon 5 lingo. Sorry. Thank the Federation of Planets!