Ever heard of Klaus Teuber?

He's one of the most famous game designers on the planet. German board games, the only kind truly worth playing.

I'm the only person I've ever met who doesn't really like Klaus's most famous game: The Settlers of Catan. Though, to be fair, this might be the fault of Mayfair games, an American company that has the habit of butchering the artwork (and sometimes maybe the rules) of German games that they republish. Whenever possible I always purchase German games republished by the excellent Rio Grande Games, which was founded in part as a response to the problems of Mayfair and leaves original artwork and such in place, while providing excellent translations.

Butchered or not, Settlers is centered on a board with a randomly generated map of an island on which you build up roads and houses. Much of the course of the game is influenced by the layout of the map.

But the map is only half of it: The real core of Settlers is the resource collection and trading game. Based on where you build, you gain various resources each turn which can be combined into more roads and buildings in your attempt to take over the island. If you don't have the resources you need, you can attempt to talk another player into trading them to you.

Settlers is such a famous and successful board game that it has spawned numerous sequels, all centered on resource collection and trading. There's the Seafarers of Catan expansion (which I hear I might fix my problems with the basic Catan game), the Cities & Knights expansion, the two-player Settlers of Catan card game (which I actually do like), and believe it or not, Spacefarers of Catan, which looks to have some of the coolest game pieces ever.

And finally the subject of this article, Starship Catan.

Starship is another two-player variant on the basic Catan trading game, but with enough twists that if it weren't for the fact that Klaus Teuber designed it, there'd be no real reason to call it a Catan game. This is perhaps the most engaging two player game I can recall jumping into. It has an amazing number of gameplay elements, yet is easy to play once you get going, and fun.

It is composed of two spaceships, one for each player. Rather than the actual plastic spaceships you get in Starfarers, here they are represented by large cardboard game boards. Each starship has slots for guns and boosters that you can connect to the ship, in addition to spaces for modules and all the resources that you track during the game.

While the starships are fancy, they are mostly there to track some game state; this is really a card game.

You've been lost in space and need to get enough Victory Points to get into the Galactic Council so they will help you home. In other words, no real backstory...just collect points until you win!

There game is brilliant in two ways. First, it takes Sid Meier's definition of a good game as "a series of interesting choices" to heart. To succeed, you need to gain and trade resources, build up your spaceship, explore, and kill pirates. To do these things, you must constantly focus on your next goal. Will you upgrade your boosters so you can explore more? Add guns so you can defeat pirates? Purchase and upgrade modules so you get new game options, such as "scanning" (letting you look ahead and change the order of the cards)? Try to fulfill a special quest for a planet? Or buy Colony or Trade ships so you can more easily secure goods if you find an appropriate planet to land on?

The trick here is that each option is valid and may help you win. At any point, you may have a dozen equally good choices for moving forward, and they are all easy to identify, thanks to clear instructions and helpful text on the game components. So which is the best at this time, against this opponent? To make things even more interesting, if you get an "advanced module" for your ship first, you get a Victory Point and your opponent loses the chance to gain that module...a double whammy that can result in races to see who can upgrade their ship first.

Another choice is your path to winning this time around. The game doesn't force one path to victory. You can get Victory Points through combat, or through expanding your ship, or through colonizing planets, or through establishing Trading posts, or, most likely, a combination of all those things. Before the game proceeds too far, the smart player has mapped out a plan to victory based on the current situation. Also, the smart player realizes that the game is designed to get tougher as it proceeds...the pirates get stronger, the quests get more demanding, and the penalties for not having a robust spaceship get higher. You can go for quick and easy Victory Points at the beginning of the game...but if you do so, will your ship be strong enough to survive the end game?

The second brilliant touch is the space exploration, using quite a clever mechanism. There are four piles of cards, each representing a sector of space. Each turn you choose which sector you want to explore. The cards can contain trade planets where you can buy/sell goods, colonizable planets, adventure planets where you can complete quests, and of course pirates who you can defeat or who will hurt you. Your number of boosters and a die roll determine how far into that sector you can go this turn (that is, how many cards you will look at). After you explore a sector, the cards in that sector are shuffled...so a sector always has the same permanent cards (and if cards are removed from the sector because you colonized a planet or defeated a pirate, new cards are added), but you don't know where they are in the stack. This means you can know that a planet you want to reach is in that sector of space...but you never know exactly what you are going to get each time you explore there.

So you need to remember where you last saw a card, and you need to be prepared because maybe you also remember that a tough pirate has been added to that sector. As a result, you frequently "fly through" a sector several turns in a row, looking for that planet or trade opportunity you remember seeing...or was it in the other sector of space?

The amazing result is that you really do feel like you are "exploring" space, even though you are just looking at shuffled cards. The game manages to turn you into a spaceship captain in a way few board/card games manage to do.

Why bring this up in BYONDscape?

You may have noticed that space trading games have become a genre of computer game, in the BYOND community and elsewhere. I believe that Starship Catan is a computer game pretending to be a card game...and that it has much to teach those other computer games.

What exactly? Well the clues to that have already been mentioned above, and the DDT has a trading game or two in the idea stages...so I'll leave the details as an exercise for the reader. In the meantime, expect more articles in the future covering classic trading games!