Catan Junior Boardgame

Recommended age: 6 - 10 years

Price: $26.99 BoardgameRecommended age: 6 - 10 yearsPrice: $26.99 Buy it from Amazon



European-style board games have been quickly surging in American popularity and availability for about three or four years now. I remember being tickled to find Carcassonne at a Barnes and Noble for the first time, though it was strange to see the board games placed in a completely different section of the store from the role playing game source books, which sat right next to science fiction and fantasy titles. Still, book stores were relatively quick to realize that people who enjoy buying a physical, hard cover book are likely to be the same people that enjoy the tactile, social experience that only board games can provide.

Big box retailers have been somewhat less adaptive to these customers’ tastes. It has been a long road for Eurogames publishers to get their titles stocked in the Walmarts of the world; in fact it was only just this last year that I first saw Settlers of Catan on sale at my local Target. I can remember an instance, during my holiday shopping, where a little boy in such a store picked Catan up and walked it over to his parents. They all looked a bit puzzled by the description on the box and eventually put it back.

This secondhand, anecdotal experience highlights the fact that, while Settlers has sold around 30 million copies to date worldwide, it is still a new game to most Americans. Part of getting the country at large more invested in the franchise is name recognition, and that starts with the very youngest consumers. And so, just this last April, Mayfair Games brought a child-focused version of Catan, named Catan Junior, to the US. They were kind enough to send me a copy, and some friends were kind enough to loan me their children to test it out.

Trading Sheep For Goats

The original Settlers of Catan is renowned as a subtle, complex game of physical and social positioning. You must read your opponent like a poker player to be successful. Their tells, however, are less about what’s in their hand and more about what they place on the board. A road here, a town there, and you can begin to see where you are going to bump heads as you expand your stake on the island. Build up a close relationship with someone across the table and they may let you pass unmolested. Deny them the resources they need to advance and they can easily box you in. Counting cards is not only possible, it’s almost required to make good decisions about what to trade and what not to trade to your opponents. While you are smiling and freshening drinks, you need to keep the high-level strategizing going in your head; you must memorize and theorize while you socialize.

Catan Junior changes this equation fundamentally, using cardboard tiles that everyone at the table can see at a glance instead of cards held close to the chest. This takes a lot of the rote memorization out of the game, and also makes the table more appealing to young eyes. It’s a lot more exciting to know that your sister has a huge pile of resources just sitting there than it is to try and remember what all the cards are in the massive hand she’s accumulated.

This iteration of Catan plays two to four players aged six and up. The goal of the game is to be the first to place all seven of your pirate hideouts on the board. Setup is relatively easy, since Catan Junior does away with the original game's interlocking tiles in favor of a static board composed of 13 individual hexagonal islands, arranged on a traditional fold-out piece of cardboard. Colored circles tell players where their two starting hideouts will go. Players additionally get one pirate ship with which to start their voyage, because sea lanes take the place of roads in this version of the game.

Following standard Catan idioms, each island has a resource which it produces for nearby players at the roll of a die. Roll a two and players whose hideouts touch the appropriate islands will see goats and molasses entering their personal economy, while a three will yield both wood and gold. Cutlasses round out the game's selection of resources and give the game a properly piratical edge.

A pretty simple conversion, I thought: trade random tiles for a fixed board, swap out sheep for goats, and you’ve cranked out a dumbed-down version of Catan that only a child could love. Little did I know how invested I and the other adults playing would also get in this little 30 minute game.

A Yes and No Answer

You can play an entire game of Scrabble and not utter a single word to your playing partner. Yahtzee could be played solitaire and no one would be the wiser (several might actually be happier, in fact). But in order to excel at Catan, you have to be a champion raconteur. You have to reason with your opponents, get them to see things your way sometimes in order to gain the upper hand. Nothing significant really happens in Catan games unless players want it to happen, and other people wanting things to happen in your favor (whether they know it or not) is the key to being a very good player.

Anyone who has had a two-year old will know how much children of a certain age enjoy saying "no". Owen, my six-year old play tester, delighted in repeatedly telling his father, Jeff, that he would under no circumstances trade away any gold whatsoever. At the same time, his sister, seven-and-a-half year old Teagan, was coaxing Owen into relinquishing two of his three cutlasses.

"If I can have your two cutlasses for this molasses I can build two more hideouts," she explained. Owen looked a bit perplexed as to why he would want to help his sister do anything, let along build more hideouts.

"Remember, Teagan," their father chimed in, his salesman flag flying high, "to always tell people what’s in it for them when you really want something from them." Always be closing, sweetheart, always be closing.

Meanwhile, eight-year-old neighbor-friend William was quietly breaking ground on his fifth pirate hideout. This broke up the clinic being conducted on value-added selling for a moment as the other three players eyed him and his pile of resources suspiciously. That next round, William rolled a six. I stopped play to point out the moment of drama.

"The Ghost Pirate is moving from Spooky Island! William, where do you want to place him?" William put him squarely inside his competition’s sphere of influence, halting the flow of gold into the game for everyone but himself, and taking two extra gold for his troubles. Until another six was rolled, I pointed out, William would be the only one receiving any gold. In addition, he would get to place his sixth hideout on Spooky Island. He was one hideout away from winning. A small hush fell over the table while everyone considered the implications. No hideouts could be built by anyone but William… no wild cards (called Cocoa Cards here) could save anyone… only ships could be built with the resources currently in play.

It was at this point that Owen came to the realization that he had accidentally cornered the market on wood. His stockpile was enormous, and only three additional wood remained in the marketplace for all the other players to compete for. Owen was suddenly a very popular person, the youngest lumber magnate in northern Illinois. Owen and William both began to haggle mercilessly with Teagan and Jeff.

The kids simply lit up over the game. I talked a bit with Jeff after the game was over about how he felt the kids took to the game. "I enjoyed it. It allowed me a lot of opportunities to get them to start to think about (consequences). I think continued play will reinforce the next level thinking."

Many games relish the opportunity to tell players what not to do. The manual that accompanies Catan Junior, on the other hand, takes the form of a mildly annotated play through that carefully tells players only what they can do. This opens the door for improvisation and higher level thinking, fueling strategies that can and must be developed on the fly to adapt to any given game situation. The opportunity to have these kinds of experiences with a child, to elicit emergent bursts of creativity, is a wonderful one for both parent and child alike.

In the end, this game is not the hack job I was expecting. It would have been easy for Mayfair to slap a Catan skin on a more traditional American board game, cashing in on the brand’s popularity with core gamers to expand their license to a family market happy enough to roll dice and pluck cards that tell them what to do. Instead, the company has kept what makes the Catan series a unique experience while removing some of the barriers that can prevent young players from getting fully invested in the experience.

What you get:

Four sets of injection molded plastic pieces. They’re light and hollow, but detailed. I doubt that the ships would win in a battle against a cat or an adult’s bare feet, but the pirate hideouts look robust enough. Each color has its own permanent starting location on the board, so take care in choosing your corner of the world.

The Ghost Pirate, in muted gray.

A set of Cocoa Cards, which for a price will randomly allow you to move the Ghost Pirate around, gather oodles of resources you might not otherwise have access to, or immediately drop a ship or hideout into play without paying for it!

Large, friendly, kid-sized resource tiles. The two-inch square tiles are printed on thick stock, making them likely to hold up for many play sessions.

Four quick-reference tiles that show what resources are required to build a hideout, a ship, or acquire a Cocoa Card. Like all the tokens in this game, they’re on the same extra thick card stock.

Basic and advanced rules. The basic rules are perfect for a table of only younger children, and are unique to the American version. Here you use an attached side-board to trade not with each other but with an island-themed marketplace. Resources found there are cheaper than those imported from the mainland, but fluctuate based on what people are trading in for them. The game starts with one of each resource available for trade, but can quickly become a dumping ground for only molasses or goats depending on market forces. (The review above outlines the advanced rules only.)

The Good:

A strong design that allows for emergent, improvisational strategies without being overwhelmingly complicated for young players.

A single game board, instead of the piles of hexagonal tiles other Catan variants are known for, means a stable playing surface.

Kid-friendly cardboard tokens mean that, barring any large liquid spills, the game will live to play another day.

A tough box, with reinforced corners and a sturdy cover, mean this edition will store and travel well.

The Bad:

The game is not compatible with the various existing Catan versions and expansions available from Mayfair. If you want to level-up your play you’ll need to put Catan Junior aside and move up to the full version of the game. But then again, that’s kind of the point isn’t it?

Wooden pieces would have upped the price of the game, I imagine, but if we’re going to play a board game then let’s do it right.

The Ugly:

The two deep furrows inside the plastic liner hold everything snugly, but don’t even make an attempt at organization. Every board game manufacturer should be constitutionally mandated to include plastic baggies or some other sorting mechanism in the inner box. Rant over.

No extra pieces are provided, so take careful inventory before you pack up.

If you step on one of these plastic pieces, your feet are going to get messed up in ways I can’t even imagine.

Verdict: Buy It