You’ll likely be aware of Catan, the board game phenomenon that bought the novelty and imagination of German design into worldwide awareness, selling 40 million copies along the way. You’re perhaps less likely to be aware of the dizzying number of expansions and spinoffs the original has spawned, such as the Catan: Histories line of historically themed games or the Rocketman EXE version released on the Japanese market.
The newest, smallest and cheapest addition to the range is Catan: On the Road which, like Catan: The Card Game, uses only a few decks of cards but boasts all-new mechanics.
What’s in the Box
Catan: On the Road
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The most striking thing about the contents of the Catan on the Road box, which is the same flimsy, hang-rail playing card format used for mass-market games like Uno, is the price. This retails at less than $10 per pack. Given the popularity of the franchise, and the design chops involved – this was developed by Benjamin Teuber, Klaus Teuber’s son – that feels like a bargain, whatever’s in the box.
And, as you might expect, all that’s in the box are cards. They’re pretty good cards, sturdy and smooth to shuffle, with pretty good art, evocative of the game’s theme of founding and building new civilizations in a new land. But it’s nothing that particularly stands out.
Rules and How it Plays
If you’re familiar with the original Catan board game, you’ll immediately understand the concepts underpinning Catan: On the Road. Each player receives resource cards which they can spend on building cards, with different buildings requiring different combinations of resources. The most common is the Settlement, which is worth one victory point. City cards, which have to be placed atop Settlements, are worth two points, and let you get an extra resource each turn. Metropolis cards have to go atop cities, are worth three points, and get you two extra resources each turn. First to seven points immediately wins.
The most obvious difference is that there is no map. Resource cards are simply drawn randomly from the deck. Roads are another building type which function like ports in the original game: as you accumulate more of them, you can cash in groups of matching resource cards as if they were a single card of a different type. There’s no robber piece, either. Instead, every time a Settlement is built players draw an event card, one half of which are robbers, resulting in everyone with more than seven resource cards discarding half. Knights are another building type that lets you keep more resources when you’re hit by the robber. Having more Road or Knight cards than anyone else gives you a hefty two-point bonus.
While the lack of map is striking, the biggest functional change between this and the original game is that there are only five face-up building cards at a time, so you can’t build whatever you want whenever you have the resources. Rather, you can either try to work with whatever is available to build a strategy around, or you can gather the required resources for the build you want and hope you’re in pole position when one gets added to the queue. This, together with the random resource draw, makes the game feel decidedly less strategic, but compensates by adding flexibility and excitement.
Another compensation is that, without the interactive blocking that happens on the map, trading is instead emphasized as a more positive means of player interaction. Whenever a successful trade is concluded, the accepting player gets a bonus resource card free off the top of the deck. This makes trading much livelier and very desirable, resulting in plenty of bargaining and verbal jousting rather than the miserly tendencies engendered by the original game. Yet you can still refuse to trade with players when they’re close to winning.
The result is, astonishingly, a game that feels an awful lot like Catan without needing a huge box and an hour-plus play time: the fifteen-minutes boast on the box is a little misleading, but only a little. The feeling of slowly building up from humble beginnings to a thriving civilization is still there as your tableau of buildings and flow of cards expands. You’re energetically driving trades and deals with your opponents for valuable resources. The excitement of the dice roll is perfectly substituted with the excitement of the card draw.
One thing that’s missing is that, without the two dice, there’s no element of playing the probability curve to strategize around. In many ways that feels as emblematic of Catan as the robber, or offering your wood for sheep. While it’s perhaps a small price to pay for the simpler rule set, kinder gameplay and vastly compressed time investment, it still feels like a loss.
A bigger problem is that the replacement Robber mechanic seems to be a bit toothless. Because you’re pulling cards at random rather than receiving resources next to your existing buildings on the map, and because trading is so strongly rewarded, you have access to a wider spread of resources than in the original. As a result, accumulating the resources required to buy a building is much more straightforward, and players are rarely stuck with more than seven cards when the Robber strikes. This, in turn, renders Knights pretty much useless as anything other than a route to bonus victory points.
There are, however, definitely multiple other ways you can approach Catan: On The Road. Trying to increase your resource income through Cities and Metropolis upgrades is the obvious one, but it’s expensive. Roads in this version are surprisingly powerful, not only offering a point bonus but the ability to swap matching resource cards for others provides enormous flexibility. Or you can potentially roll with whatever the building deck and turn order gives you, attempting to reach the winning tape through Settlements and the Knight bonus.
Once you’re used to the different paths to victory, you can mix things up by using the alternative Metropolis cards. Rather than giving two resources per turn, each of these offers one extra card and a different effect that you can pick which you want when you build it. Two of them give extra resources depending on how many Roads or Knights you have. The other two let you win ties for the bonus points awarded for the most Road or Knight cards. These are a worthwhile addition: two-resource Metropolis cards feel a little overpowered, and these variants offer a bit of extra strategizing. But Metropolises are not built frequently enough for them to be a major game change: since each is worth three points, by the time anyone builds one, the game is almost over.
