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Part 2: About Harbor Settlements, Ships, and Settlers

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To play with the expansion, you need the dice, settlements, roads, resource cards, some terrain hexes, number tokens for them, and the frame pieces from the Base Game. The additional frame pieces of the expansion allow you to assemble scenarios of different sizes.

The illustration shows the smallest scenario possible. To avoid spending too much time assembling the scenarios, you tile the surface inside the frame with composites of sea hexes (sea hexes that are joined together). Thereby, three areas are formed. In the light yellow area on the left, you assemble the starting island. On the right, in the two areas to be explored, you place terrain hexes of the expansion facedown.

The two unexplored areas of the smallest scenario accommodate 16 unknown hexes, while the largest scenario includes 32 hexes to be explored.

To explore, you need ships. Building a ship costs one lumber and one wool. The ships are not only used for exploration. They also serve to transport game pieces. Each ship can accommodate either 2 small game pieces or one large game piece.

Alert readers may have asked themselves why I didn't mention cities when listing the game components required from the Base Game. I did that intentionally, because building cities is not part of the new expansion.

Instead, you can upgrade coastal settlements to harbor settlements by paying 2 grain and 2 ore. Like a city, a harbor settlement is worth 2 victory points, but its owner receives only 1 resource when the number of an adjacent terrain hex is rolled.

A harbor settlement consists of a group of houses with a basin in front of them. Like a ship, a basin offers room for either a large game piece or 2 small game pieces.

The large game pieces include the settlers, of which each player receives two.

Building a settler costs the same resources as required to build a settlement. If you have built a settler, you place him in the basin of a harbor settlement or directly on an adjacent ship.

Needless to say that the settlers' task is to found new settlements in the discovered area or on the home island. Since it is not allowed to move game pieces overland, a settler always depends on a ship that picks him up and transports him to his new home.

Klaus Teuber

• Read more:
  Part 3 – introducing the first scenario, “Land Ho!” of the new expansion “Explorers & Pirates”