TREASURES, DRAGONS & ADVENTURERS

If you enjoy exploration, you will have fun with the Treasure Islands or Departure into the Unknown scenarios. In The Treasure Islands, you leave the coasts of Catan in search for new land. On your way, you discover not only small islands that earn you additional victory points but also treasures that provide you with considerable advantages.

Conversely, in Departure into the Unknown – published here for the first time – you start on a small, U-shaped coastal strip and explore a large landmass in the center of the “U”. You’ll find treasures in this scenario too; here, you can also hoard them, in order to snag a good special harbor or invest in victory points.

In Greater Catan, all players start on the home island in the center of the game board. You reach the surrounding islands with your ships and found new settlements there. Soon the resource production on the home island starts to decline because the number tokens on the home island move to the hexes of the new islands. Happy the player who was able to spread out on the new islands in time!

Whether on Catan ever existed dragons, as in the scenario The Desert Dragons, is anyone’s guess. But let’s assume that those mythical creatures did exist and, one day, would come out of the desert and gradually occupy the land hexes of Catan. What should you do? Emigrate? Well, that would surely be the best option. Fortunately, there‘s a neighboring island without any dragons, and you should head for it as quickly as possible. There you take a deep breath and surround yourself with knights. With their help, you can reconquer the original home island bit by bit.

Except for the scenario just described, all scenarios work well in combination with the Cities & Knights expansion. The scenarios The Great Canal and The Enchanted Land were specifically created for the combination of Seafarers and Cities & Knights. Needless to say that in these two scenarios the focus is on the knights.

In the scenario The Great Canal, you must jointly dig a canal in order to cultivate a desert and its adjacent fields. Since the knights mostly just stand around in between the barbarian attacks, you hand them shovels so that they can make themselves useful digging the canal. If you let your knights dig assiduously, you are awarded with additional victory points.

In the scenario The Enchanted Land, the knights are allowed to have an honorable side job again: hunting dragons. The dragons live in the enchanted land and guard valuable treasures there – treasures that become special victory points as soon as you get hold of them. Unfortunately, the enchanted land is an island, so you must first build ships to send your knights across the sea. By the way, you shouldn’t send weaklings to the island of the dragons because it also harbors mighty dragons which can only be defied by mighty knights.