Catan: Explorers & Pirates (2015 Refresh)

Catan: Explorers & Pirates is an expansion for Catan, the classic board game by Klaus Teuber. You'll need the base game of Catan to play this expansion. Inside you'll find five scenarios and three missions. You can combine these, or mix and match them up. Explorers & Pirates takes the base game of Catan in a new, different direction... literally! The core mechanisms remain from the base game - you still roll two dice for resources. But there's a lot of changes. The island's a different shape, for starters. And, there's no cities in Explorers & Pirates. Instead, you can build port settlements on the edge of Catan. From here you can build ships that sail off into the mysterious waters! Who's going to navigate the ship? Sailors! That's right, you can 'build' sailors and new settlers to explore the open ocean. The rulebook explains a bunch of different scenarios, all with suggested starting layouts. New hex tiles (both water and land) come in this expansion. You place them out in a fashion where you'll sail off to settle new islands. The land begins the game face-down (undiscovered). Once you sail to it, the tile flips, where it'll be one of the terrain hexes. Transported a settler here? It becomes a settlement on this new island!Some of the hexes could be pirate lairs. Instead to settlers, you could transport sailors, who fight these pirates. Many sailors overwhelm the pirate lair, and then that hex becomes a safe location. It generates gold for adjacent settlements. Talking of gold: if you roll dice and get nothing, you get one gold instead. You can trade in two gold for any resource - hooray!Conquer pirate lairs you could earn yourself Pirate Scourge token, which is worth 1VP. The game is still a race to earn the most points. You can establish this end-game threshold depending on which scenarios you play. There's also a Fish For Catan module, and a Spices For Catan one, too. These are pick-up-and-deliver mechanisms. Who will deliver the most resources back to Catan's guildhouse? You can introduce these modules one at a time, or hurl them all together. There's so many new strategies to take in Catan: Explorers & Pirates... Player Count: 2-4 PlayersTime: 90-120 minutesAge: 12+