Materials: Basic Settlers of Catan game, plus the 3 core expansion backs of SeaFarers, Cities & Knights, and Traders & Barbarians. I also strongly recommend that you purchase the 5-6 player expansion back for those four scenario packages to provide enough board pieces and resource & commodity cards)
I set the board up to be as physically big as I could with the boarder pieces allowing me to use all but two of the of the interior hex pieces we own.
To get an idea for for how the interior hexes were arranged, look closely at the picture. Obviously you can choose any set up you want, but I did put a lot of planning into the hex layout to best accommodate the use of all the different pieces and scenarios. Water had to be available with enough quantity to make good use of the ships from seafarers. The land pieces also had to remain connected with at least a thin road to allow for the use of the Traders & Barbarians scenarios.Setup details for the various scenarios:
Seafarers: Plenty of water to include the use of the ships. A couple of small islands for Heading to new shores and islands. We did not include the Fog Scenario in this due to the physical challenges of keeping the board to hold together while having to either insert new hexes or flip over unknown ones. Next time we do this, the small islands and fringe hexes will like start upside down to incorporate the fog scenario, if only on a small scale.
Through the Desert was included as by setting up at least 3 desert hexes connected together forming a barrier to at least one other resource hex.
Forgotten Tribe and Cloth for Catan never came into play, but can be easily added with the use of pre-set chits for additional victory points at the scattered islands.
The Pirate ship was used along with the Robber.
The Wonders of Catan (one of my favorite scenarios) was a fun challenge to fit it. Through the Desert setup allowed for the preparation of the Great Wall Wonder availability. I had to also make sure that there was two areas set up with a 'channel or straight' of water between two land hexes for the Great Bridge Wonder. The rest of the Wonders of Catan didn't require any physical restrictions.
Cities & Knights: This is the easiest to incorporate. To be honest, we rarely ever play a game of Catan that doesn't include this scenario. Use of the flip charts, additional commodity cards, progress cards and development cards are all that's truly required. No physical board/hex issues drive the use of this expansion set.
Traders & Barbarians: To use this expansion set effectively required a decent amount of planning and fore thought on how to place the land hexes to be successful.
Fishermen of Catan was the easiest by including the fish hexes somewhere in the board and the fish resource edge tiles around the board of the land hexes and setting up the fish resource draw pile.
Rivers of Catan was critical to provide enough interior land hexes and allowed for the use of bridges and the wealthiest and poorest settler tiles.
Caravans was tricky to prep for. We used two Oasis hexes and had to make sure that land hexes split out in the three different directions. We set the rule that camels could not go over water and would not be happy sailing over the seas on ships and had to stay on land. Therefore there had to be ample connected land hexes to allow the growth of the camel caravans. This meant we couldn't have 4 scattered islands, but one large pangea styled land mass with pockets of water, while keeping a couple of small islands out on the far seas.
Barbarian Attack required the use both castle hexes which we set at opposite sides of the land mass. This allowed for the launching of the Knights (the stand up kind) to battle the barbarians that would be landing throughout the game.
Traders and Barbarians (we call it the Wagon Train Scenario): We used the 1 center Castle Hex fromt eh 5-6 player expansion pack in the center of the board and then spread the rest of the Glassworks and Quarry hexes around the far edges of the land mass. This fostered the use of long roads and plenty of movement of the wagon. We did agree to that a wagon could be loaded on a ship and sailed across the sea, so that if a road used ships to sail the open waters, you could use move your wagon along that road to deliver necessary goods.
Additional Setup notes: One of our favorite challenges is to create random variability in laying down the number tokens on the hexes. If you look closely at the picture above, all the number tokens are upside down as well the fist resource tiles. Those tiles were placed face down in a random pattern. They remain face down during the first round of development, but are all flipped face up before the second round of development.
This is where it gets a bit interesting. Due the to number of sea hexes used with this layout, there were actually a couple of number pieces not used. While the number tokens were randomly placed, we kept out a 4, 5, 9, and 10 number token. They were placed upside down off to the side. If after the first round of development, you discover that you built on a 2 or 12 number token, you then have the option to draw on of the extra number tokens and swap it for the the 2 or 12. However, the penalty for doing so is that you do not get to draw a set of starting resources with your second settlement.
We included the use of the of all the different development cards, the largest army card, the longest road card, and the harbormaster card.
The game itself went to 33 victory points, though we could have really stretched it out to 40 or more. The game lasted for hours with break for dinner. Plenty of drinks and snacks were kept on hand. The biggest frustration came from the fact that once we were in the thick of the game, one individuals turn could take up to 30 minutes sometimes due to the building and bidding on camels for the caravan, placing of knights, landing of barbarians, analyzing longest road, keeping track of total victory points, and planning for what your next moves would be.
It was a blast and I'm certain we're going to do it again in the future. Next time though, we're going to bring in two more people and have a 6 player version of this to see just how "Ultimate" we really can be with the Catan Challenge.
