Pyramid Review
Elasund: The First City of Catan
Published by Mayfair Games
Designed by Klaus Tauber
Boxed set with game board, 40 wooden Victory Point Cubes, 4 round wooden cylinders, 1 wooden boat, 2 wooden dice, 2 city gate tiles, 37 building tiles, 9 church tiles, 36 city wall tiles, 20 building permits, 4 turn overview sheets, 51 gold cards, 39 influence cards, & 1 rulebook; $49
Elasund: The First City of Catan is the second Catan spin-off in a series called "Adventure Catan," with the first being Candamir. The goal of this game is to deploy all ten of your Victory Point Cubes (VP) to the game board by building structures on the map that have spaces for them. Designed for two to four players, the play area is enlarged in proportion to the number of players. Settlers of Catan players will notice the familiar grid of two to 12 along the coastline, with the 2 and 12 along the north and south border walls, respectively. The 7 is still lacking, as it represents the familiar robber mechanic.
Setup involves distributing "exclusive" buildings to each player (colored with no VP cube spots), separating the buildings of each type, and shuffling the temple tiles and Influence cards. The gold cards are stored face-up as they are identical. Each player is given three gold cards and one Influence card, and his two, free, starting buildings are placed on their colored official starting locations. Each player has a Wall stack in front of him with his wall tokens in increasing order. The board is . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: December 7, 2007
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