Review: Catan: Seafarers
Score:
82%
To be honest, the N-Gage had a lot going for it just before it was retired. The game catalogue was pretty impressive (Rifts, Mile High Pinball, and Pathway to Glory’s Ikusa Islands spring to mind), but the standout title for me was the first mobile version of Catan. This German boardgame has continued to live on in electronic form as well as continuing to gather fans in its physical form. Rather selfishly, it’s one of the few N-Gage games that I’ve been hoping would make the jump to the next-gen platform (which it didn’t). Licences Exozet have done the next best thing though, with a J2ME version. And it's rather good.
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Catan on the N-Gage classic - back in the old days.
Available in the Ovi Store, this is an impressive application, no matter the language that it’s programmed in. It also appears to be tweaked so it works well on the large, touchscreen-only Symbian devices (the only giveaway is when you type your own name in and you're handed over to the regular Symbian text input screen, which is a bit jarring). The bottom line is that it works, no matter how they’ve done it.
Catan is a strange breed of board game – it’s not a race as such, or a linear progression around a maze – in fact it doesn’t even have a fixed board! The original game comes with a bundle of hexagons representing forests, fields, mountains, quarries and grassland (and one desert, just to confuse things a bit more). These are laid out to form a larger hexagonal island, where players compete to build villages, cities and roads, claiming resources as the game progresses, slowly gathering up victory points till you reach the winning total (normally ten, but easily altered).
That original game is available to play here, but the expansion set “Seafarers” opens up more land and tactical options in the world. After an introduction to the game and the first challenge using the original game, you’ll be opened up to the extra flavour of Seafarers.
Catan is also a complicated game, and being in an unusual form there’s not an obvious “it’s like X but with a few changes” so the inclusion of a tutorial mode is almost a prerequisite. It’s not only comprehensive (with nine major parts to it) but as it works through a typical game it’s like having a best friend explaining the game clearly as you play along for the first time, before letting you have a go yourself.
I’ll be honest, if this was sold as a “how to play Catan” java module, it would still be worth the money.
But it’s more than that. Once you’ve got through the tutuorial you can just go ahead and play the basic game (it’s “Free Play”) but you also have the option of a campaign of games – a set of structured levels where you have to achieve specific goals. The first level is just 'win a basic game of Catan' (so that’s the free play option to have Catan as you’d expect), but as this goes through more complicated levels of play with awkward scenarios (such as an island where the forest produces almost no wood throughout the game), it’s not only a great challenge but acts as a tactics master class.
And eventually you move up to the “Seafarers” variant of Catan – providing islands, sea routes, more options and even more complicated gameplay.
The game is mostly menu driven, using UI elements native to the game. It’s a bit of mess, with the main menu of items popping up on the right hand side, options boxes justified in the centre of the screen, icon buttons along the top bar that sometimes work and sometimes don’t. Normally I’d be really upset at all this, but the layout is so familiar to me (ahem, I might just have Exozet’s Catan on the iPad...) that I’m letting it off with a raised eyebrow of a warning. Catan, the game, is stylish and quirky already, a few funky dialogs aren’t going to change people’s opinions.
Make no mistakes, Catan needs an investment of time to learn and understand. But if you do then you will be rewarded with a game that you can continue to play for years (just as I have, after discovering it on the N-Gage QD). So this is a Java version, and some more animations and a better touch UI would have been the icing on the cake, but it’s 95% there for what I want in a Catan game on my mobile, so I’m happy.
-- Ewan Spence, Jan 2011.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at