Catan 3d 5-6 Player Expansion

[Stayce Cawthorn]

Pleasenote: If you want to play the expansions with of five or six players, you need, in addition to the base game and the expansion you have chosen, a base game extension and an extension to that expansion - i.e., a total of four game boxes.

Catan is a brilliant game to play with all kinds of people, but the base box limits you to three or four players. While the experience at either of these counts is fantastic, many people find themselves wishing that they could bring the game to the table with a larger group. With the expansion, that?s exactly what you can do.

So how does the 5 to 6 player expansion work? The box provides you with 11 more terrain hexes that will allow you to construct a much larger playing surface. Additional sea pieces help you to frame the new shape. On this larger board, the game plays almost identically to regular Catan.

The only further difference is that all players can build at the end of?every?turn, so you don?t have to nervously glance at the robber as your hand fills up with resources on five other players? turns. This clever twist also keeps the game moving, helping to make it as fast, if not faster, than with three or four players.

The Catan 5-6 player expansion also makes it possible to play with 5-6 player extensions for some of the base game?s expansions. You can buy player extensions of Seafarers and Cities & Knights if you want to use this product to help bring those expansions to larger groups.

Not right. More Catan means a longer game. Instead of finishing in about an hour and half, our games have doubled, especially with new players. Trying to convince someone new to stick with the hobby when their first experience is a three hour game?? That mes amis is a recipe for failure. Luckily, a few games of Code Names can easily remedy the situation.

Since then it has spawned tons of sequels, expansions, spin offs, and maybe someday the LA Rams will play in Catan Coliseum. And the next year in 1996, it spawned the 5-6 Expansion (or as Board Game geek calls it, THE EXTENSION.)

The small box comes with 11 additional terrain hexes to make a bigger board, new frame and harbor pieces, additional resource cards and development cards, and everything else you need to add two more excited Catan fans.

Look, its not all bad. those new bits do come with some cool new colors, green and brown if I recall correctly, for your roads and settlements and cities. (If you are like me, you can add them both to the regular game as additional choices.)

Tiles & Markers: Additional hexagonal tiles are included to allow for the construction of a larger island--so that there's still room for everyone. The new island has a diameter of 6 rather than 5.

With the new tiles come new number markers, used to control the randomization of the board. A whole new set is provided so that good variance can be provided throughout the island. Unfortunately the first 18 of the new number markers look exactly like the original 18 number markers, except with different numbers on them. It's thus incredibly easy to get them mixed up; the obvious answer is to mark the backs of all the new markers in some way, but using a different colors for these markers in the printing process would have worked better.

Overall the components of this expansion exactly match the quality of the original. It's a tiny bit more expensive per capita, but not much and my one complaint over the lack of distinguishing marks on the new number markers is ultimately a nuisance. Thus this expansion earns a "4" out of "5" Style rating, just like the main game.

Special Building Phase: After the end of each player's full turn (production/trading/building), all players then get an opportunity to build. If order matters, each player builds clockwise around the table from the player whose turn it was. There's no playing of cards during this phase or trading--just building.

The Settlers of Catan played by 5 or 6 players faced the problem of players gathering together large sets of cards during other players' turns, then losing them all to a robber, all without getting any chance to do anything. This would have increased randomness (and frustration) by quite a bit.

Allowing players to build after other players' turns does resolve this problem. Players can't always build exactly what they want, because they can't trade, but they can at least get cards out of their hand.

However, I've never found this rule to be that elegant; I don't like forcing players to remember slightly different sets of rules for different playing conditions. I would personally have preferred something more visually obvious, like changing the card limit at which the robber steals cards, then clearly marking that on all the building cost cards.

We're having another gaming afternoon soon. We bought the 5-6 player expansion to Settlers of Catan. This didn't come with a proposed 'beginners layout'. With some beginners joining us, I had to create a suitably even board for all players. Here is the first proposal.

Now up to 6 players can share the very rich set of 4 variants and 5 scenarios in Catan: Traders & Barbarians! Infuse even more fun and excitement into your Catan games without sacrificing ease of play. Add 1-2 more friends and family for more interaction and more drama! NOT a complete game! You need a Catan game, a Catan: 5-6 Player extension, and a Catan: Traders & Barbarians expansion in order to play with this great game extension!

Catan (previously called "Settlers of Catan") is a classic boardgame designed by Klaus Teuber. It's probably the most successful of the Euro-style games, and has spawned numerous expansions. It uses a beautiful and endlessly variable but always familiar board. I've played it off and on for 10 years, and one of my first instructables was a 3D plywood version of the board.

This strategy guide does NOT tell you how to play the game. The rules are described very clearly in the game itself and are freely available online. This guide is to help those who know how to play already but want to be more competitive, whether in person, online, or even against those pesky 'bots. It's broken into parts: initial setup of settlements and roads, probabilities, development cards, the robber, five strategies to try (Commander, Developer, Producer, Explorer, and Queen of Sheep), the mid and late game, troubleshooting, and a few final words. It's vastly longer than I initially intended and contains a high level of nerdy overanalysis. Feedback welcome.

Initial setup is crucial in Catan. There are different levels of sophistication here, starting with the obvious and moving to the more subtle. Good players consider all the factors below, and how much weight should be given to each in a particular game is dependent on the exact layout of the tiles and numbers.

1. Get one of everything. You're going to need all of wood, brick, wheat, sheep, and ore, so why not make sure you have them all at the start? Place your first settlement so you get 3 different resources, and pick up the final 2 with your last placement.

2. Maximize pips. Each number has pips on it indicating its probability (out of 36) of being rolled on a given throw of the dice. Place your settlements looking to maximize your probability of getting resource cards (if you're placing numbers according to the recommended spiral convention, the best you can do is 13 pips, e.g. 5/6/9). To maximize pips, you should generally avoid the desert and the coast. See the second photo, above.

3. Ports. Choosing late in the round often leaves you with poor choices, and coastal options may become appealing if they come with a port (though make sure it is one with 2 hexes adjacent, not one!). Especially good are ports that match nicely with your best resource-gathering tiles.

4. Get a good distribution of numbers. The ideal is to get as many different number placements as possible. This seems a little counter-intuitive, but it is great for experienced players as it keeps them in the game regardless of how the dice shake down. The dream initial placement is something like 4/6/9 and 5/8/10... 2/3 of the time, you will be getting a resource card, and you'll feel involved throughout.

5. Balance resources. Try to get roughly the same number of pips of wood and brick, and similarly for ore and wheat. Paired resources like 9 of wood and 9 of brick will give you an instant road every time a 9 is rolled, and this sort of synergy is powerful.

6. Where to next? You need to consider options for expansion, and this can be a good tie-breaker in your decision making if you feel two placements are essentially equal. See roads, next step.

7. Prioritize ore and wheat. There are highly competitive strategies that need very little brick and wood. But no strategies can do without ore and wheat, so if you don't start with them, you'd better have a plan of how to get them...

Obviously, the order in which you get to go will affect your opportunities. There are no significant advantages inherent in going 1st/2nd/3rd/4th, though players who strongly prefer a particular strategy tend to want to go earlier. I personally prefer to go second or third - there are often three good spots on the board to begin with, but the choices get worse as the board fills up and choosing late can leave you with poor options.

You need to point these towards where you would like to build your next settlement. This will nearly always be towards the outside of the board. Don't bother pointing it at that empty 5/9/10 intersection - someone will occupy it for sure. That 4/9 port? Perfect. Road placement is all about second-guessing your opponents: you basically want to point your road at the (n+1)th best position left on the board where n = the number of settlement placements left. This is tough on round 1 of placements for obvious reasons, but gets easier as further placements are made and if you go first/last it should be a big part of your settlement placement strategy, too - your second placement should be in a decent spot that also allows you to point towards another decent spot AND hopefully inconveniences someone else.

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