There is no doubt that Settlers of Catan is one of the most wildly popular board games. If you’re like me, it was one of the first board games you played that required strategy to win. For me, it helped open up a new world of board gaming. While I still mildly enjoy Catan, the new Settlers of Catan Dawn Of Humankind is definitely my new favorite version of the game. Catan Studios recently sent me a copy to review and I had a ton of fun playing it.
The premise is that instead of building up one connected civilization, you are an early man living a more nomadic life. Instead of building stagnant cities, you are encouraged to build as many camps as you can and move old ones when you run out of camp miniatures to place. In order to build a camp, you will need a person miniature on a space with a camp token. There are a few different kinds of camp tokens and when you collect one of each you will earn extra points. Instead of the longest road you move around the map collecting exploration tokens. Once a player has two tokens they get a trophy that gives you a point, but it will move once someone gets more tokens than you. In order to explore certain areas you will need to upgrade certain skills: Food, Clothing, Construction, and Hunting. Food and hunting give extra movement and let you move the neanderthal/saber tooth tiger (thief equivalent) while clothing and construction will open up new areas of the map for you. There are bonus points available if you fully upgrade each of those areas first.
As you can tell, there are lots of different ways to get points in the game which is something I really appreciate. In my playthrough someone went for upgrading all their skills first while others focused on exploration and camp building. There are various animals on each of the exploration tokens and each one will have a different effect when flipped over. One of each kind of token will give you a point, but it is random where it will be placed. Other tokens will remove numbers from the starting area making the tile useless which really incentivizes players to get their camps built across the board so that you can move away from the starting area. The game all sounds very complicated, but if you’ve kept up with regular Catan then this one will not be too hard to pick up, it will just take a few turns to figure out how to balance everything.
I really enjoyed this game. For some reason I was better able to wrap my head around the strategy of this one. I liked that instead of building a road and getting thwarted you got to explore a huge map and race others to certain areas. Although each turn there isn’t really more to do than the original Catan, I still felt more able to progress in the game even with some turns having extremely limited resources.
I would say if you’ve enjoyed Catan games in the past you should definitely play this one. At its core it is still Catan, but all the new mechanics definitely breathe new life into the game. I found it to be a refreshing change, and for that I’m giving it a 10/10.
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