Catan: Trader and Barbarians Expansion Board Game Review

The bestselling, board game of the year, Catan has four expansions, one of which is the Traders and Barbarians. If you play Catan, you will become obsessed with it if you like strategy. The game is incredibly simple to learn, frustratingly difficult and rewarding to master, and the art is absolutely spectacular. You start out with two settlements and two roads and gradually spread your little kingdom around the board gaining Victory Points by constructing new settlements and cities, earning achievements, and buying development cards. First to ten Victory Points is the winner. It's simple, but fun. Once you've played it for a year or so you begin to want some more. That's were the expansions come in. Catan would not have been nearly as successful without them, and Traders and Barbarians is the one we are going to look at today. We will only look at one of the around eight different ways to play with the expansion, the scenario Traders and Barbarians, from which the expansion get's its name. 

The Expansion introduces several new concepts to the board, wagons, gold coins, barbarians, and several new development cards.  Wagons allow you to deliver special resources to different places around the bored, the castle, the quarry, and the glassworks. Delivering these resources gains you victory points. Upgrading your wagon can be expensive, but it's worth it as it allows you to speed around much faster than your opponents. Gold can be used to pay tolls to other players and can be earned by delivering resources. You can also use it to buy resources to construct your kingdom. Barbarians are like a replacement thief (Which by the way is not used in this expansion.) Three are placed around the board. Moving it allows you to steal a resource from a player, but does not affect the production of resources, unlike the thief. 

I hope this review helped you in deciding whether or not to get Traders and Barbarians! Keep in mind that this does not cover the other scenarios in the expansion, you get more than triple what I've described here, and it's well worth your money. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it, and I'll see you next time!