Ed received another free Mayfair game to review and I jumped at the chance to try it out. I am glad that I was able to try it before buying it because given the name I would have bought it sight unseen. I like settlers games. They are not perfect because they involve a dice. However, you can overcome the randomness of dice rolls by picking your initial sites and by making advantageous trades during the game.
Unfortunately, even though this game has the settlers name to it, it is not a settlers game! Instead, it is a solo adventure game much like Die Rückkehr der Helden. During the game, you explore the board by turning up movement cards. These cards show where you can move for free, where you can move and find resources, and where you must successfully adventure to move. When you finally make it to your selected spot on the board, you uncover a chit that gives you resources and you teleport back to the start city. When you are in the start city and not adventuring, you can turn in resources for victory points.
And that is pretty much it. The only negative thing that you can do to other people is drink a potion that can reduce everyone’s hit points by one (which is used as the maximum movement. You can spend a turn healing it). We rarely traded in this game. And this game took a long time to play (2:30 with rules explination).
I spent much of the game increasing my statistics instead of getting victory points. It was a race between Ed and Jon winning the game. At least I was 1 victory point behind them when the game ended.
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To finish out the night, I play this light and quick dice fest. Unfortunately, the dice hated me tonight and I was not able to lock out any column. You can see how poorly green is doing!