In the context of its fictitious history, Catan is situated in the area of today’s Azores and, in terms of size, encompasses all islands of the group. As described in Rebecca Gable’s novel “The Settlers of Catan,” in 850 B.C.E. Catan was first settled by a seafaring Nordic people.

In real history, the Azores were discovered and taken in possession by Portuguese seafarers in 1427 and 1432.

Therefore, it stands to reason that – in fictitious history – Catan is (re)discovered by Portuguese seafarers at the beginning of the 15th century, and that some decades later conquistadores from all countries of the Old World set out for Catan like barbarian conquerors, to steal from the island what they regard as its only valuable good: gold.

Barbarian Attack

„Barbarian Attack!“ The shrill cry came from the village square and jolted the inhabitants of a small coastal settlement awake. Siward the Scout stood at the center of the square. Spots of hectic red burned on his cheeks as he told people that three ships had landed on the shore and soldiers with strangely shaped iron hats were pouring out of them.

Siward the Scout

“Don’t panic, folks!” said the village leader to calm the distraught settlers who, only scantily dressed, came running to the village square. “The barbarians won’t waste their time with our small village. They are only interested in the city with its rich merchants and craftsmen.”

The village leader is right about that. The barbarians are dangerous only for principalities that have at least one city. And even this is only the case if the prince does not have enough units to fend the invaders off with.

To resist the barbarians when a “Barbarian Attack” event occurs, a prince (player) must have placed at least as many units as he has victory points from cities, metropolises, and city expansions. In this context, all units count, whether they are ships, heroes, or characters without hero status. If the prince has fewer units, he loses 2 resources. If he has more units and at least one city, he receives any 2 resources of his choice.

There is a total of three Barbarian Attack events. According to the normal rules, those events would be quite innocuous, and no prince would feel compelled to take major precautions against the Barbarian Attack. However, since the attack of the barbarians is the theme, the rules for preparing the event card stack were slightly modified for this Theme Game:
Momentarily set aside the 3 Barbarian Attack event cards and the Yule card. Then shuffle the other event cards of the Basic Set together with the Retreat of the Barbarians event card and place 3 cards face down. Place the Yule card on top. Shuffle the other 6 event cards together with the 3 Barbarian Attack cards and place them face down on the remaining stack – that is, on top of the Yule card.

Border Fortress

If a Barbarian Attack is drawn during the game, place the card under the 4 topmost cards of the event card stack instead of returning it to the bottom of the event card stack as usual.

That way, the barbarians arrive quite frequently and force the prince to brace himself for the attacks. Let’s see how our prince prepares for the Barbarian Attack.

Barbarian Stronghold

The prince stood, with his legs apart, on the tower of his Border Fortress, giving the Barbarian Stronghold a sullen look. The Stronghold stood out like an ugly boil, marring the beauty of his land. The barbarians seemed to be getting ready for an attack on his principality.

Marie the Shieldmaiden

“Osmund,” the prince shouted. “Are we prepared?”

Arnd the Strategist

“We were, my prince. Unfortunately, Marie the Shieldmaiden made eyes at our Candamir, so that he defected to the princess of the opposing principality.”
“That disloyal scoundrel! May Odin’s ravens come after him! What do we do now?”

White Raven Tavern

“We’re facing a difficult situation, my prince. All our problems would be solved in one fell swoop if we succeed in winning over Arnd the Strategist.”
“Then hire him, Osmund. Or is there anything that prevents you from doing so?”
“Arnd demands a new sword in exchange for his service. Regrettably, we don’t have the ore to forge one.”
“What?“ roared the prince. “Shall a shabby ore decide the fate of my principality? Either you come up with a solution right now, or I sell you as a slave to the robbers!”.
Osmund hesitated for a moment. “I might have an idea, my prince. But it requires a little gold.”

Wolfgang the Street Performer

“I only have one nugget of gold. How do you want to get ore for it so fast? You’re not going to roll the dice in the White Raven Tavern, are you?”

But that’s exactly what Osmund did. And he was lucky. Not only did he win a big lump of ore for Arnd’s sword, he also won back the prince’s gold. During a celebration – true Catanians are always up for celebrations, even in the face of an impending Barbarian Attack – the prince was thus able to win over Wolfgang the Street Performer. Even if the Street Performer was better at playing a lute than at wielding a sword, he still reinforced the lines of defense. And so the prince only needed one more unit to stop the barbarian hordes and even defeat them.

Castellan

And how does the princess in the neighboring principality fare at the same time?

Castle

“I hate celebrations!” the princess ranted and nervously brushed a stray lock of hair out of her face. “Now we also lost the Street Performer to the prince. Castellan, do something!”
The short-sighted Castellan peered intently out of the window of the Castle‘s tower room. “You worry too much. There are no barbarians as far as the eye can see.”

Caravel

“But they’re coming, Castellan! Siward, the prince’s scout, allegedly has sighted them. And for what other reason does the prince reinforce the lines of his units in such a frenzied manner?”

Relocation

The Castellan sighed. “But just recently we have built a Caravel, by means of which – due to a Relocation - we strengthened the power of our fleet, and we have placed another unit in our Border Fortress. Considering that our resource supplies are depleted, we can’t do more at the moment, my lady.”

Baroc the Barbarian

The princess rolled her eyes. “I can’t stand your monotonous ‘we can’t do more’ and ‘depleted resource supplies’ any longer, Castellan. Is your vocabulary really that limited? Get out of my sight and send me Baroc the Barbarian.“

Hunched over, but on the inside happy to escape the princess’s bad temper, the Castellan left the room. Soon after, a stately warrior in iron armor entered the tower room.

“At your service, my princess!”

The princess liked the resourceful barbarian; she had been able to persuade him – with gold and a seductive smile – to change sides.

“My dear Baroc,” the princess benevolently greeted the warrior, “you know about my problem. I trust that your resourcefulness will replenish my resource supplies.”

Arsenal

Secret Brotherhood

Bailiwick

“Well, princess, first of all, it was a mistake to build the Arsenal. For your enemies, the weapons stored there are a coveted bounty, which is why they will increasingly try to invade your city. You should have invested your resources in the Secret Brotherhood. The secret brothers have connections to the barbarians and can assuage the consequences of a potential defeat.”
The princess’s nicely curved lips tightened into a thin line. She just couldn’t take any criticism.
“But it is not my intention to lecture you. At least you have a Bailiwick. Use it, and new possibilities will open up to you.”

Contest of the Heroes

So the princess called the bailiff. He advised her to arrange a Contest of the Heroes.
“Great idea!” the princess rejoiced. “Didn’t Candamir recently change sides, thanks to my dear Marie? Then he should prove himself now and compete against one of the prince’s heroes.”
Of course, Candamir won the contest and thus provided the princess with the resources she needed to reinforce her Border Fortress with another unit.

Now let’s take another look at the realm of the prince:

Alliance Against the Barbarians

“For what purpose am I supporting you?” raged the prince. “So that you bring me shame all the time? If you don’t immediately replace the wool I lost to the princess during the contest, I will …”
“… sell you as a slave to the robbers,” Osmund cut in, unperturbed by the prince’s words. And I already know whom to rob then, Osmund grimly thought.
“My prince, why don’t you suggest an Alliance Against the Barbarians to the princess. That will make your subjects optimistic, and they won’t complain if you raise a special tax.”

Siegfried, Vanquisher of the Barbarians

Retreat of the Barbarians

That way, the prince got another unit for his Border Fortress just in time, because shortly afterwards the barbarians attacked the two principalities. As expected, repelling the invaders wasn’t difficult for the Catanian units. And the princess still took it up a notch. She ordered Siegfried, Vanquisher of the Barbarians to pursue the defeated invaders, which he did so successfully that the Retreat of the Barbarians was not a very orderly retreat. It actually looked as if the barbarians were running away from the devil himself.

Triumph Card

If a player successfully survives the Barbarian Attack, he may rotate his Triumph Card to the next higher level instead of taking two resources. The Triumph card is a marker card a player automatically places as soon as he has built his first city. It is conveniently placed on an empty space above or below any region. It can be removed from there at any time and placed at a different location if the space is needed for a region expansion.

In my last blog post, I promised to introduce the new Tournament rules at this point. They are now available for download at catan.com.

I am currently working on the concept for the second expansion, “Age of Gold” (working title). The editorial team will probably need until spring of next year to discuss, test, and finalize the concept and all the corresponding cards. At that point, I will get back to you right here in this blog space and introduce “The Era of Explorers” set (working title). Until then, I wish all readers of this blog post lots of fun with the new cards of the “Age of Darkness” expansion.

Klaus Teuber

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In 1997, the “Tournament Set for the Card Game” was published as the first Card Game expansion. My inspiration for this expansion came from “Magic, the Gathering,” during the mid-nineties a cult game in Germany. Although the rules of the two games are totally different, they do have one thing in common: both games can be expanded by means of new cards.
I liked the concept of Magic, where each player assembles his own deck from a selection of cards to compete against his opponent. I adopted this concept for the Tournament Set I wanted to develop especially for ambitious gamers: the players no longer replenish their hand with cards from shared stacks but from their own stacks, which they assemble from the cards of the Basic Game and the cards of the Tournament Set before the actual game begins.
Now, with one’s own card stacks, it was much more effective to pursue a certain strategy. However, each player needed a Basic Game and a Tournament Set to ensure a satisfactory selection of cards for the respective strategy.
I didn’t adopt Magic’s trading card concept. A player who – in Magic and in all other trading card games that came after it – wants to get new cards must buy so-called “booster packs,” which are small expansions containing randomly integrated cards. These small expansions include more common and less common cards. If a player wants less common cards, that is, good cards, he has no choice but to purchase some booster packs to get those cards.
Of course, a lot of money can be made with a trading card game, but I thought that the concept didn’t go well with Catan, and I also was a little afraid that I would be compelled to continuously invent more cards to fill the small booster packs with new cards.

The Tournament Set for the Card Game

Therefore, the Catan Card Game did not become a trading card game. The tournament fun didn’t come cheap, though – after all, each player needed his own Basic Game and his own Tournament Set. Although a corresponding note in big letters was showing on the back of the Tournament Set box, many buyers overlooked it and were understandably disappointed that the Tournament Set in combination with their Basic Game wasn’t enough.

Dissatisfied gamers are an anathema to every game author, and the publisher Kosmos wasn’t happy about the complaints arriving every day either. Therefore, I came up with a variant that allowed playing the Tournament Set with only one Basic Game: the expanded Basic Game was born. Already in the second edition, this variant was integrated into the rules of the Tournament Set. A third edition was not published because the Tournament Set paved the way for individual Theme Sets.
With each Theme Set, an expanded Basic Game – that is, a Basic Game with additional, theme-related cards – was possible. At the same time, each Theme Set offered ambitious Tournament Game players the possibility to use additional cards for developing new strategies or decks.
The Theme Sets appearing in October of 1998 were called Wizards and Dragons, Politics and Intrigue, Trade and Change, Science and Progress, and Knights and Merchants. They comprised the cards of the Tournament Set as well as new cards whose basic ideas people had sent to Kosmos in the context of an ideas competition.

The Theme Sets (1998)

This ideas competition developed into a giant project for me that kept me busy for almost nine months. Over a thousand letters came in, and some contained novel ideas. Now the task was to integrate those ideas with the already existent cards and my own ideas about the theme-related sets.

Testing isn't such a dry affair after all. - Testing the game with my older son Guido (1998)

When the prototypes of the new Theme Sets were ready, I mainly tested them within the circle of my family and with members of the Kosmos staff. At the time, I also received support from Brigitte and Wolfgang Ditt who tested the new sets and provided valuable tips and suggestions. As is the case with tests, shortcomings came to light. Cards were rejected or modified and changed over to other Theme Sets. Then the testing, rejecting, and modifying continued, and later there was more testing…

When the Theme Sets finally were done, I heaved a sigh that probably could be heard beyond the walls of our house. I was relieved to have concluded the work, but I was also satisfied with the new Theme Sets and hoped the gamers would be too.

Since the Theme Sets sold very well, I assumed that people liked them. In 2001, the company USM published a PC version of the Card Game – including a small expansion called “Tournament Cards 2002″ – and simultaneously created an Internet platform that enabled players to compete in the Tournament Game online. Every once in a while, I also played there and soon found out that some cards were actually too strong, while other cards were almost never used in a game.

Originally, I hadn’t planned on developing another expansion for the Card Game, but somehow I couldn’t stop thinking about the shortcomings regarding the interplay of the cards when playing in Tournament mode.

Barbarians & Traders (2003)

In 2003, therefore, the sixth Theme Set was published. It was called Barbarians and Traders. On the one hand, with the theme of this set I wanted to seize the idea from the Board Game expansion “Cities & Knights,” where the players jointly defend themselves against the invading barbarians. On the other hand, there were – as mentioned before – some cards in the old sets that allowed for overly powerful decks and other cards that were irrelevant. In combination with a minor reform of the old cards, the new Theme Set was meant to reduce the potential of overly strong deck strategies and strengthen the variety of strategic directions of decks.
After I had created the first prototype, I asked some experienced Tournament players I had met when playing on the Internet or at the Catan weekends in Bilstein, Germany, to help me test the game. At this point – given the great variety of existing cards and their possible applications in the Tournament Game – I no longer thought myself capable of keeping track of all eventualities or recognizing all possible shortcomings of the cards.

After six months of intensive collaboration, my previous prototype had changed its appearance. The basic idea had survived, but some of my cards had been eliminated, and my fellow testers’ card ideas had found their way into the set instead – an example of this being the Scribes Offices, a card the card gamer community can hardly do without nowadays. The testing team had become a development team. (More information about the development team can be found here under “Barb. & Handelsherren” – German language only.)

In the meantime, the annual sales figures were declining considerably. Sebastian Rapp, meanwhile responsible for Catan at Kosmos, and I agreed that the Tournament Game was the culmination of the Card Game – but nevertheless reached only a relatively small number of gamers. Therefore, the next new set, titled “Artisans and Benefactors” and published in 2007, focused on the expanded Basic Game.

Artisans & Benefactors (2007)

For this set too, I presented a prototype whose central theme was the satisfaction of the subjects to the well-tried development team established in 2003. Once more, a very constructive development phase ensued. The end result was a set mainly suitable for gamers who found the Tournament Game too elaborate and time-consuming and who wanted an exciting expansion for their Basic Game, but it also contained cards that were interesting for Tournament players. The set actually received very good reviews, and many gamers rated it the best Theme Set for the expanded Basic Game.

However, the new Theme Set unfortunately couldn’t stop the sales figures from declining. Unlike the Board Game, which year after year shows rather constant sales figures, the Card Game sales dropped considerably each year. It was foreseeable that Kosmos sooner or later would have to remove the Card Game from their game portfolio. So, at the end of 2008, the question was what to do next. Two possibilities were discussed: either to let the Card Game die or to revive it.
I agreed with Kosmos that a revival shouldn’t just concern the graphic art but should also include a revision of the game’s content. The fact that it was more and more difficult for the Card Game to win friends surely had its reasons.

In my next blog post I will specify those reasons and describe my thought process that laid the ground for the revision of the Card Game.

Klaus Teuber

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