Seafarers of Catan: 5-6 Player Expansion Review

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(More customer reviews)This 5-6 player expansion allows you to play a 5 or 6 player game for Seafarers Of Catan. However, it's not a standalone product by a long shot as you'll also need Settlers Of Catan (for the majority of its pieces and components), Seafarers Of Catan (for its red, white, blue, and orange ship pieces as well as other Seafarers components like extra/special tiles, harbor tokens, and frame pieces), and Settlers Of Catan 5-6 player expansion (for its green and brown pieces, extra development cards, extra resource cards, and tiles/tokens) in order to use this game + player expansion. By comparison, the Seafarers player expansion provides relatively little compared to the rest just mentioned. You get 15 brown and green ship pieces, 10 more victory token markers (despite the 6 that the box says, I guess it was a typo as the Catan series has never been known to provide extra or spare pieces, but between the 2 boxes, this does give each of the 6 players 3 Victory Point markers), 8 extra sea tiles, and 1 gold field tile. The manual is smaller since the expansion box is smaller than the 3/4 player packaging of Seafarers, but thankfully, this is also a recent, full color edition, so setting up the scenarios aren't as difficult and time consuming as they could've been. It should be noted that some of the components that would only be used in this player expansion, like the 5-tile `X' frame extensions (2 `XX' and 1 `X' frame piece for each side) and 2 of the 3:1 harbor tokens (up to 10 of the 12 harbors are used in the game expansion) came with the 3/4 player version of Seafarers. I'm guessing it was just cheaper and easier to manufacture it like that, even though the smaller, player expansion box could've fit all of those extras. If you were able to find the player expansion rulebook online somewhere or still retained the physical copy, you could easily get away with combining 2 (3/4 player) Seafarer game expansion boxes to play the 5-6 player scenarios.
Scenarios remain mostly the same as many of them that had separate 3 and 4 player versions, namely The Four Islands, Oceans, Into The Desert, and A New World have now been updated for separate 5 and 6 player variations. The names of the 5 and 6 player versions of The Four Islands have been changed to The Five Islands and The Six Islands respectively (and yes those boards do contain 5 and 6 islands). The 4 player versions of The Great Crossing and Greater Catan have been updated to their respective 6 player versions in the player expansion. Oddly enough, there's no 5-6 player version of New Shores. It would've been possible to fit the larger, oblong shaped island from Settlers Of Catan 5-6 player expansion into the largest frame Seafarers 5-6 player expansion offers, but I suppose they had their reasons against that, possibly because it would skew gameplay or that Greater Catan VI is already somewhat similar to that. So you now have 10, not 11 scenarios to work with in this expansion, but like with Seafarers, the new scenarios that remain will keep the game interesting and players coming back for more. For more insight on Seafarers Of Catan, be sure to check out my Seafarers Of Catan review here on Amazon as well.
Otherwise, the game plays similar to Seafarers Of Catan + Settlers Of Catan player expansion fused together. You have the special build phase where there's no player trading, bank/port exchange, and use of development cards, or one could elect some unofficial variants like discarding half your cards if you have more than 9 cards when a 7 is rolled. Either way, it's now with a delightful Seafarers twist. With overall even larger maps taking even more time to set up, more players to distribute resources to after each roll, and more turns for each round of turns, games definitely take longer than before. Having more players to trade with in theory speeds things up, but in practice, all the different things that add to gameplay length still outweigh having more potential trading opportunities. In fact, many of the scenarios are listed as taking about 1 to 2 hours to complete, with Into The Desert VI taking about 100 minutes and the monstrous, 18 pt Greater Catan VI taking about 3 hours to complete. However, with most games, more players means longer games, and as far as long games go, this one is a blast. Yeah, compared to typical, "mainstream" board games, this is expensive since you need 3 others of them in the series as prerequisites to play, and this expansion is the most expensive given the item to price ratio, but if you enjoy such a unique game as Seafarers with a crowd of 5 or 6 players, then it really is worth it.


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Note that you will need the basic Settlers of Catan game to enjoy any of the expansion packs. In addition, with all Settlers of Catan expansions, make sure you're picking upthe right ones. Each of the three Catan products (Settlers, Seafarers and Cities & Knights)have their own unique 5-6 player boosters.

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