This little tuck-box promises a Catan-like experience with 3 or 4 players, in 15 minutes! Yes, you heard me right, 15 minutes. Not only did I find that hard to believe but as with a few other Catan spin-offs, I felt it could land a bit flat. Grab some wood, round up your sheep and get our Catan on!
Catan… On Cards
Gone are the dice, gone is the map you all built on and in their places are a few decks of cards. All players will be building a tableau of cards in front of them. You know, normal Catan stuff like roads and settlements, all of which will trigger abilities and events, affecting players and their card-drawing ability. It’s a very brisk race to 7 points and the player who can trade and build most effectively will be the saviour of Catan!
Resource Gathering
The first part of anyone's turn is resource gathering. This replaces the die roll of standard Catan and certainly has its advantages over those little cubes of misery. Firstly, you always get something; all players draw one resource card. These cards are your standard wood, clay, sheep and wheat and all players get one. On top of that, whoever's turn it is, also gets several extra cards on top, depending on things they have built. Some buildings give you increased resource gathering capabilities and I thought that this system not only felt fairer but really motored the game along at a brisk pace.
This little tuck-box promises a Catan-like experience with 3 or 4 players, in 15 minutes! Yes, you heard me right, 15 minutes. Not only did I find that hard to believe but as with a few other Catan spin-offs, I felt it could land a bit flat. Grab some wood, round up your sheep and get our Catan on!
Catan… On Cards
Gone are the dice, gone is the map you all built on and in their places are a few decks of cards. All players will be building a tableau of cards in front of them. You know, normal Catan stuff like roads and settlements, all of which will trigger abilities and events, affecting players and their card-drawing ability. It’s a very brisk race to 7 points and the player who can trade and build most effectively will be the saviour of Catan!
Resource Gathering
The first part of anyone's turn is resource gathering. This replaces the die roll of standard Catan and certainly has its advantages over those little cubes of misery. Firstly, you always get something; all players draw one resource card. These cards are your standard wood, clay, sheep and wheat and all players get one. On top of that, whoever's turn it is, also gets several extra cards on top, depending on things they have built. Some buildings give you increased resource gathering capabilities and I thought that this system not only felt fairer but really motored the game along at a brisk pace.
Building and Trading
The next part of your turn will be very familiar to Catan fans; it's where you trade with players and build up your tableau. There are some very clever design choices here that keep the game moving and encourage trading while restricting what players can build. It’s all rather well-thought-out.
Firstly, the trading. It works like standard Catan, except you can only make 1 trade with 1 player and to grease the wheels of commerce, as they say, the person you trade with gets a free resource from the deck. Lovely jubbly! We found this made people far more likely to trade and it is such a small change that has massive ramifications for this phase of the game.
After this, you are free to build. The things you can build come from a deck and the ones you can build on your turn are restricted to the 5 flipped cards in the ‘shop’. This means you not only need the resources on your turn but you also do not have access to everything at the same time; it all depends on the 5 cards on display. You can also build powerful metropolises and they sit off to the side and can be built when you have fulfilled their prerequisites.
What is awesome here is another small change from the main game; the maritime trades you do in Catan have been slightly tweaked. When building, you can trade 4 of the same resource with the bank for 1 resource needed to build a building. Short of 1 clay, you can trade 4 sheep to make up for it, but you can only do this once per turn. What is clever about this system is that every road you have built decreases the number of resources you need, and if you have 4 roads, it's a 1-for-1 straight trade, very powerful indeed!
Longest Road and Largest Army
As with base Catan, there are reward cards for players with the largest army and the longest roads. Each of these offers 2 points to the owner, respectively. They work almost identically to this game's big brother. Once a player hits the threshold, 3 for roads and 2 for knights, they get the card and every time a player surpasses their total, the card moves to them.
As with the standard Catan game, keeping these to yourself can give you a massive points boost and players fighting over them is always entertaining.
Events
Whenever you build a settlement, you have to draw a card from the event deck and resolve it. Along with many events that replace the original’s development cards, this is where the robber resides. When you draw the robber, as always, if you have more than 7 resources, you have to lose half. Again, though, Catan: On the Road has a clever twist up its sleeve. Every knight you employ (well build, but build sounds weird, so we will say employ) increases the number of cards you can have in your hand when the robber strikes.
Along with the robber, you generally have cards that award resources depending on what you have built and events to draw the field closer together by making the leader give resources to the person at the back. It’s all good Catan-based fun!
Small Tuckbox
Catan: On the Road comes in one of those annoying cardboard tuckbox things that lasts about 10 minutes. Luckily, with it only being a deck of cards, there are many options for carrying it around. I, personally 3d printed a small box for it. Don’t get me wrong, the tuckbox is fine, but mine tore before I even started playing it. I do put that down to having quite heavy-handed friends though. The same happened to my Flip 7 box, too. I need some new friends.
Even though it's only a deck of cards, everything is clear, concise and has that ‘Catan’ look we all love and adore. You cannot ask more than that really, quality components that do not hinder the gameplay in any way.
Final Thoughts
If you had said to me you can get a ‘Catan’ experience in about 15 minutes, with some intelligent gameplay changes, I would have called you insane. Here we are, though, Catan: On the Road is faster, fairer and still retains that Catan-like gameplay style.
It's so fast and so much fairer. Everyone gets a resource every turn, more if you have improvements. Players get rewarded with another resource when trading and everything just flows like butter. Don’t get me wrong, I slightly miss the map building and blocking other players but it’s a small price to pay for a version of Catan this brisk and this easy to table.
For all those times I fancied a game of Catan but did not have the time or energy to set it up, I will, in the future, reach for Catan: On the Road, a true surprise to me and a great achievement. Well done, all involved.
