Catan Die Erste Insel: Not the Model of Excellence
Written: Sep 23 '09 (Updated Oct 02 '09)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: comes with seafarer's expansion, decent graphics, clever controls
Cons: very limited multiplayer, could use some music, crappy AI
The Bottom Line: Best to wait for Carcassonne or the iPhone version of Catan.
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| kjell1979's Full Review: Catan: Die Erste Insel for DS |
It seems to me that the Nintendo DS would be a perfect place to try and resurrect competitive board games like Ticket to Ride, Axis and Allies, Diplomacy, Carcassonne, or Settlers of Catan. The DS is portable, it has voice chat support, and you can play games online via the Wifi connection. However, with the exception of the upcoming release of Carcassonne, there isn't much in the way of board games with the exception of a few forgettable board game collections.
However, Europe did get a special release of Catan Die Erste Insel (translated as "The First Island") and I was lucky enough to know someone local who imported a copy that I could borrow for a few weeks. However, after spending some time with the game, I don't think "lucky" is the right word to describe the time I spent playing this game.
Gameplay
Catan Die Erste Insel is a video game adaptation of the board game The Settlers of Catan. Catan is a board game similar to that of the beginning phase of a small Civilization map. Settlers have arrived on an island and they must colonize it. The goal of the game is to score 10 victory points before your opponent can. Victory points can be achieved by creating settlements, upgrading your cities, creating the longest road or biggest army, or by simply drawing a victory point card from the deck of development cards.
Each player starts out by claiming a settlement at the point of a hexagonal tile. Then a road is built connecting that settlement to another hexagonal point along one side of the tile. Many settlements will border one, two, or three different hexagonal tiles. These tiles represent one of 5 different resources (and a desert card worth nothing): ore, wheat, wool, lumber, and brick. These resources are used to build things in the game. For instance, a road can be built for one brick and one lumber resource; a settlement for one wool, one lumber, one brick, and one wheat; an upgrade of a settlement to a city for three ore and two wheat, and a development card can be drawn for one wool, one wheat, and one ore.
Each hexagonal tile is also given a number value from 2 to 12. Players take turns rolling a pair of dice, where the number rolled will correspond to a tile and therefore pay out that resource to whoever has a settlement or city bordering a tile of that type. Cities pay out two resources per successful match. If a seven is rolled, first any player that has more than seven resource cards must discard half of them rounding down. Then the player who rolled the seven gets to move the robber piece to a tile of his choosing. What that does is prevent any player from getting resources from that tile. In addition if any opponent has a settlement bordering it, he or she can blindly draw a resource card from their hand.
Development cards play a huge role in Catan. When you buy one during your turn, you cannot play it. However, in any future turn you can play the card. There are a few different cards that appear in the deck: a Knight card allows you to move the robber to a tile of your choosing. It acts as if you had just rolled a 7 without the need to discard resources for people with more than seven cards. You can play this card at any point during your turn including before you roll the dice. There are also victory point cards as well as cards that grant you two resources of your choosing or monopoly cards that allow you to claim all cards of a given type which exist in the hands of your opponents.
Trading is an essential part of Catan. You can trade resources with other players, or with the bank. Trading with the bank is at a 4:1 ratio, meaning you must trade four of one type of resource for another of your choosing. By placing a settlement at a port space on the edge of the tiles, you can trade with the bank at either a reduced rate of 3:1 or even 2:1 for a given resource. So even though these settlements aren't bordering 3 different resource tiles, they can still be just as valuable when used right.
The strategy behind Catan is your ability to collect victory points while limiting your opponents from doing the same. In most games a single player might have a superior position and the other players will attempt to gang up on that opponent to prevent him or her from winning the game. Other times, it's trying to figure out who is going for the longest road or figuring out what resources allow you to collect the victory points you need to win the game.
Catan Die Erste Insel features some gameplay elements from the Seafarer's expansion pack. This expansion allows you to build boat routes to travel to distant islands. In addition there are additional ways of earning victory points such as the first one to build 2 or more settlements on an island gets two victory points. Alternatively there's the harbormaster achievement of building two or more cities on a harbor point first nets you 2 victory points. However, this version of Catan doesn't have all the elements of the Seafarer's expansion such as the fishing tiles or gold tile, but the additions they did provide are very solid.
There are several different options while playing Catan Die Erste Insel. There is a campaign mode (in English or German). This serves as more of a tour of all the different gameplay elements and variations as well as allows you to unlock each scenario as you beat the computers. It's a good diversion, but it hardly has a worthwhile story and just takes up a few hours of your time. The free play allows you to setup the board with lots of different options including which map you want to use, whether the tiles should be randomized, whether to use dice or a dice deck of cards, and how many victory points determines the winner. This is the mode I played the most after finishing the campaign.
Of the most disappointing aspects of Catan is the shotty AI. The AI opponents in Catan will do some things well. Computer players will correctly identify who is in the better position to win regardless of score and completely try to screw that player (AI or Human). They even are pretty smart with their trades and while they'll typically reject complicated trades, they will be competitive with simple ones. While Catan’s AI achieves a lot of harder goals, there is one important component missing. The AI players just don't play to win. As Herman Edwards says, "You play to win the game!” So often they hoard resources too much and the robber ends up taking them away when they should be building with what they have or trading it away for what they need. So often I don't know what their plan is for victory, yet I can never figure out why they don't at least work with the position they are dealt. In the end, I can absolutely obliterate the computer by as many as 5 or more victory points; an absolute blowout in Catan terms.
Multiplayer is also a huge disappointment too. You can play against other players via the wireless connection. However, the multiplayer is all local. To make matters worse, everyone must have a copy of the cartridge. This is extremely prohibitive in that it's an import game and most people do not have their own copies of many games anyway. It's amazing to see that there are games out there like Catan that fail to take advantage of at least the download feature on the DS, let alone the online Wifi connectivity.
Overall Catan is very faithful to its board game counterpart and offers quite a bit in the way of scenarios and gameplay elements. However, the biggest issue is in the details. The AI and multiplayer are clear drains on the gameplay.
Controls
The controls are one of the better aspects of Catan. They are stylus-driven in that you use your stylus to perform almost any action from typing in your character's name to placing settlements, roads, cities and ships. The game is really good about detecting the placement of your stylus and rarely have I ever made a mistake. Most actions have a confirm button such that I can undo any accidental slips of the finger or stylus. The interface overall is one of the better one's I've seen in a board game. I wish you could zoom in from time to time, but it isn't critical as in other games like Ticket to Ride because the board isn't elongated.
Graphics
The graphics are pretty decent. The game board looks sprite based but it's actually polygonal. As you adjust your view of the board certain pieces have different lighting and perspective indicating that of a board with true polygonal depth. The sad thing is, you can't zoom in on the depth of the board like in the Xbox Live Arcade version to see the actual polygons, but the graphics look nice when playing the game.
The rest of the graphics are all sprite based. Player portraits are displayed instead of animated players and the campaign graphics are all storyboards. This is somewhat disappointing, but not all that crucial to the play of the game.
Sound
The audio in Catan is puzzling. There's not much music to speak of. The opening theme does feature some light lute music. But when it comes to playing the actual game, there really isn't any music to speak of. The sound effects are equally boggling. There are some chopping or bell sound effects, but they don't correspond to a single set of events, they're almost random. It would be nice if a sound effect corresponded to a specific event so you could tell what's going on even if you're staring off into space.
Replay Value
There isn't much replay value here. I was kind of hoping for some kind of online multiplayer via the Wifi connection. But the lack of that sort of connectivity in the multiplayer realm really hurts this title. In addition, the local multiplayer requires multiple carts, which makes this game very prohibitive when it comes to importing it because so few people have the cart here. The lack of a comprehensively competent AI for the computer makes this game thoroughly worthless when it comes to any lasting value. The idea of unlocking scenarios is a nice touch, but what's the point if you can't play against anyone who can put up much of a fight?
Overall this game has a nice foundation, but it just doesn't do the job it needs to. A game like this can get away with bad computer AI, or bad multiplayer connectivity options, but not both. It's a shame because a game like this doesn't just lack polish, but it's tarnished so badly the game is almost unplayable. Sure it's faithful to the game's rules and it features a lot of neat gameplay elements from the core game of Catan and the Seafarer's expansion, but it almost serves as more of a demonstration of the game itself than something that can replace the actual board game. To this end I feel sorry for anyone who picked up this game in Europe and even more so for anyone who decide to import it here. You should stay away from this one.
Update 10/2/09
So I find myself playing Catan more and more lately. I still stand by my criticisms and I still think that this is a risky import of a board game that so socially oriented. I just grossly underestimated how much fun this game can be when you have a half hour to kill. So I'm updating the rating to 3 stars as a result.
Recommended:
No
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kjell1979
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