SETTLERS OF CATAN DAWN OF HUMANKIND is a great addition to the franchise

There is no doubt that Settlers of Catan is one of the most popular board games. If you’re like me, it was one of the first board games that you played that strategy to win. For me, it helped open up a whole new world of board games. Although I still like Catan a little, the new one Settlers of Catan Dawn Of Humankind it’s definitely my new favorite version of the game. Catan Studios recently sent me a copy to review and I had a lot of fun playing with it.

The premise is that instead of building a connected civilization, you are a primitive man living a more nomadic life. Instead of building stagnant cities, you are encouraged to build as many camps as you can and move old ones when you run out of field miniatures to place. To build a camp, you will need a figure of a person on a space with a camp token. There are different types of camp tokens and when you collect one you will earn extra points. Instead of the long way you move around the map by collecting exploration tokens. Once a player has two tokens, he gets a trophy that gives you a point, but he will move once someone gets more tokens than you. To explore certain areas you will need to upgrade certain skills: Food, Clothing, Construction and Hunting. Food and hunting give extra movement and allow you to move the saber-toothed tiger / neanderthal (thief equivalent) while clothing and construction will open up new areas of the map for you. Bonus points are available if you fully upgrade each of these areas first.

As you can see, there are many different ways to get points in the game which I really appreciate. In my playthrough, some first tried to improve all their skills, while others focused on exploring and building fields. There are various animals on each of the exploration tokens, and each will have a different effect when flipped. One of each type of token will give you a point, but it is random where it will be placed. Other tokens will remove the numbers from the tee area rendering the tile useless, which really incentivizes players to build their courts across the board so you can get away from the tee area. The game all sounds very complicated, but if you’ve kept up with normal Catan this won’t be too hard to learn, it will only take you a few turns to figure out how to balance everything.

I really enjoyed this game. For some reason I was able to understand the strategy better than this. I liked that instead of building a road and being hindered you had to explore a huge map and run with others in certain areas. While there isn’t much else to do in each turn than the original Catan, I still felt more able to progress through the game even with some extremely limited resource turns.

I would say if you have enjoyed Catan games in the past, you should definitely play this one. Inside it is still Catan, but all the new mechanics definitely give new life to the game. I found it a refreshing change, and for that I give it a 10/10.