In 2011 an expansion called "Age of Darkness" (German: "Dunkle Zeiten") with the theme sets "The Era of Intrigue", "The Era of Merchants Princes", and "The Era of Barbarians" was released. They are a simple idea, yet they offer much to the game. Expand your settlements and cities, recruit heroes, and defend your lands through politics, invention, and intrigue. Im working on translating a player hints sheet from the catan.com website that should help people have better first plays with each of the decks. Action cards do not cost anything to play, though they may have other requirements that must be satisfied before they can be played. The new building replaces the removed building and, therefore, must be placed at the same location. The game does not include any text-based guide, other than the card almanac, so it can feel overwhelming at first. In order to better understand the reasons for the relaunch of the game, Klaus Teuber also gives deeper insights into the origins of the card game. InThe Era of Turmoil,Traitors, Archers, and Arsonists make the competition between you and your opponent a little tougher. Certain cards provide skill points while others provide progress points. Mark is correct that it has been sped up with some of the modifications (the exchange of cards being the most important), but theres still the luck of the die roll, the take that plays that remove points from your opponent (a mechanism that neither Shelley nor I like), and the game play which feels laborious more than fun. If you are really good, you will be able to place a production booster card between two matching fields. So, when I read that Klaus Teuber was rebooting the card game to both streamline the game play & the playing time, I was pretty excited. The principality is composed of two settlements, a road, and six productive tiles relating to the five known resources of Catan (wood, brick, wool, wheat, ore), as well as gold. Submerge yourself into the bustling life on Catan - be the prince or princess of Catan and decide on the fate of its settlers. The Shipbuilder reduces the building costs of ships. over on the Catanism Blog entitled The Reform of the Card Game in 2010. A picture of Heiko Windfelder, the Publishing Director Toys at Kosmos Verlag, was used as a model for the card. Each of you has 6 regions where - should the dice roll result be favorable - you can harvest resources such as lumber, brick, and ore, just as in the CATAN board game. After a couple of quick "practice games" with the basic set, I was excited to try using the first theme deck. the Basic game (no city cards to 7 points) really is a 30 minute game and while its not a particularly fulfilling way to play. From there on, the differences between it and the Catan boardgames are significant, and I am not going to repeat them again. No other Catan product is necessary to play this game, which is a card game reinterpretation of the famous boardgame. As far as I can see, the only loss suffered from the original game is the plethora of expansions with the note that the expansions introduced some FAQ-induced headaches to the game. The hand management rules changes Mark mentioned really seem to speed up the development of your kingdom leading to shortened playtime. If you play Ron you may rotate 1 empty region up to 3 resources. This website uses cookies to help us deliver our services and collect customer data. Barbarians invade! Montebanc (no relation) This game is played to 7 victory points and includes 36 Expansion Cards in four stacks. In the following blog posts, Klaus Teuber reports on the background to the revision and introduces the new illustrations of the cards.