Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Settlers of Catan Oil Springs Modification

Settlers of Catan is one of my favorite board games. We always use the Seafares, Cities and Knights, and Fisherman expansions. We have also enjoyed using the Volcano expansion on occasion. Why am I telling you this, well because I have been working on my on custom expansion for Catan for many years that would be compatible with all of the expansions I play with. During my work on this expansion we came across and started playing with the Catan Oil Springs Scenario, which was great to mix things up and make the desert useful. However, I felt the contents were cheap and needed to be improved. I also started trying to incorporate Oil into my own expansion, but as others have pointed out the theme of Oil doesn't fit with the medieval theme of Catan.  

Since I no longer plan to include Oil in my own expansion I thought I would share the improvements I made to the Oil Springs Scenario pieces. First, up is an actual resource card for Oil.

I don't mind the idea of tokens, like for fish that aren't considered resources, but it really bugged me that Oil is a resource and counted towards your hand limit but was a token.

Second, was making the Desert Oil hex one piece instead of the small piece that you just put on top of the deserts.

Next thing that needed changing was replacing the metropolis tokens with metropolis pieces that match the ones from Cities and Knights. Along with that the trade-in/build guide needed to be updated.


Lastly the Champion of the Environment token needed to have a card that was similar to the Longest Road victory point card.


Unfortunately because of the theme brake I haven't printed any of these but I do plan to barrow these ideas and the ideas of others to keep many of the elements introduced in this expansion. For those that like the Oil Springs Scenario I hope you enjoy these improvements.

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