Review – Catan: On the Road

Catan: On the Road takes Settlers of Catan and gives it the Monopoly: Deal! treatment. In other words, it takes the original base game and streamlines it into a 15 minute experience without completely altering the game. There are some obvious changes: with the board gone players will draw resource cards every turn so they can build, and now the Robber is one of the event cards that can be pulled when someone builds a new settlement. Players take turns doing a Harvest phase, where everyone gets 1 resource card and the current player also gets more cards for each of their cities and metropolis, and an Action Phase, where the current player can make 1 trade, and build 1 of the 5 available cards in the building row. So is it a streamlined success or is it rolling a 7 when you’re the only one with extra resources? Read on for the review!

Review

Since we already covered the basics of Catan: On the Road (COtR hereafter) here’s everything else that’s new: You start with 1 Road and 1 Settlement, and every Settlement you build during the game will force you to draw an Event card. Some of these are good, some are situational and only benefit players doing the worst, and a few are Robber cards, which function like the original robber but affect everyone at the table. In order to stop the Robber from making you discard for having more than 7 resources you could “build” Knight cards, which will protect 1 more of your cards for each Knight you have. For example, if you had 2 Knights, you wouldn’t have to discard anything for the Robber unless you had 10 or more cards. Having 3 roads or 2 Knights first will net you the Longest Route or Largest Army cards, respectively, and other players will have to build one more than you to steal the card away. Oh, also, the more roads you build the better your substituting for a wild resource will be, up to a 1:1 if you have 4 Road cards. 

Speaking of Robbers, there are 4 other Event cards that make up the 7-card Event Deck: Abundance, Charity, Solstice, and Subsidy. Abundance lets each player (except those with Longest Route or Largest Army) draw 2 resource cards, while Charity makes the player with the most Victory Points give 1 resource to the player with the least. Solstice lets everyone draw 1 resource then shuffle the Event deck, and Subsidy lets each player draw a card for every uncovered Settlement in their play area. Settlements covered by Cities do not count.

When you build places for your people to stay in COtR, you have to start with Settlements, then you can build a City on top of that, and if you’re lucky you can build a Metropolis on top of that (it’s the house to hotel pipeline, to go back to referencing Monopoly). Cities are worth 2 Victory Points (Settlements are only 1) and get you an extra resource during YOUR turn as the active player, and Metropolises get you 2 extra resources on your turn and 3 Victory Points. Metropolises also have an (A) and a (B) side, but you should use the (A) side for your first game. The (B) sides all have different powers, and you should make sure all the Metropolises are on the same side before starting play. 

Trading also has a small new twist: not only can the active player only trade once, the player they Trade with gets to draw a card from the top of the Resource deck. This incentivizes players to keep trading well into the game when everyone is close to a 7th Victory Point. Which is good, because as soon as someone gets a 7th point, the game immediately ends. 

I love it when bigger games come out with a small card game that manages to distill the experience down without losing the spirit of the original. I refuse to play the original Monopoly, but Monopoly: Deal is easy to say yes to; COtR has that same feel. It’s quick and feels less mean since the Robber hits everyone with 7 or more cards – unless they managed to get some Knights. You also don’t have the slow plodding setup of picking your spot on the board and then hoping you get good numbers. There’s still some randomness with the Resource deck, but by building Roads you can negate some of that pain by just substituting something you have an abundance of. My only gripe is that you still technically need 3-4 players in order to make this work – while this is accurate to the original Catan, it feels odd to have such a narrow and specific player count. I guess part of me hoped there would at least be a 2 player variant. 

Besides that, Catan: On the Road is everything you’d want a streamlined card version of a 2-hour game to be. It still has trading, and building, and you still hate to see the Robber show up. But now it’s easier to substitute resources (if you built Roads), or to protect yourself from the Robber (if you built Knights), and players have good reason to keep trading throughout the game due to the fact that they can get even more resources that way. If you love playing the original Catan, you should definitely check out Catan: On the Road; but even more telling is if you hate Catan, you might actually like this new version as it overcomes most of the objections to the original. 

A review copy was provided by the publisher.