Settlers of Catan, Greater Catan maps

Greater Catan (IV)

Overview

Note: These instructions are for the 4-player variant. There is no 3-player variant for this scenario. Instructions for a 6-player variant are here.

Greater Catan is an enormous undertaking. To play requires 2 full copies of Settlers of Catan and one copy of Seafarers. The game is to 18 points, and there are no special Victory Points available. Each player receives one normal set of pieces plus the 4 cities of the same color from the second set. (Remember to return these to the other set at the end of the game!)

This scenario typically requires about 2.5 hours to play in real life, including setup times. You can combine the scenario with the Cities & Knights expansion, which is extremely interesting, but will easily add another half hour to the time to play. Although there is no official ruling to this extent, you may wish to increase the number of Victory Points required with Cities & Knights (20 works well).

The basic idea behind the scenario is that the resources on the mainland are being depleted, and the settlers must now venture out into the surrounding areas of Greater Catan to continue their production.

Setup

1. Assemble the Seafarer's frame, using two "large X" extensions on the two horizontal sides.
2. Take the land tiles from one set, shuffle them, and layout a "main island" as you would in a normal game, including placing the number chits.
3. Lay water around the island and then place the Seafarer's harbors (4x 3:1, 1 ea. 2:1) around the main island (see map for placement).
4. From the other normal Settlers set, take the land tiles without the desert and shuffle them. Lay these out according to the map. These tiles do not start with numbers on them.
5. Either from the second set or from the seafarer's box, take out the following number chits: 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11. Set these aside face-down and shuffle, or use an opaque bag: they'll need to be drawn at random later.

Rules

1. Each player must place both initial settlements (or settlement and city, if playing with Tournament rules or Cities & Knights) on the main island. Players may build ships instead of roads if they build at coastal locations.
2. When a player builds a road or a ship along side (not just up to) a tile on the small islands that does not yet have a number on it, he or she draws a chit at random from those set aside during setup and places it on the tile.
3. If there are no more chits left in that set, the player must move a chit from the mainland according to the following rules:
   1. The numbers 6 and 8 must never be placed next to each other on the small islands.
   2. No settlement or city may be left such that it has no production (i.e., one of the hexes it is on must have a number on it).
   3. The chit taken must be removed from a hex that is adjacent to one of his or her own settlements or cities.

   These rules are listed in order of precedence: if a player cannot remove a chit that satisfies all 3 rules, he or she may ignore rule 3 so long as his or her choice satifies the first two rules. In this way, you could potentially remove a number from an opponent's settlement or city, if removing any chit from one of your own settlements or cities would leave it with no production. Remember that if you can follow all 3 rules, you must. (Theoretically, if you reached a situation such that you could not follow rule 3 and you could not follow rule 2, you could ignore both and follow only rule 1, but this is extremely unlikely to ever happen.)
4. All other normal Settlers and Seafares rules apply, except that since players begin with 8 cities, they may build that many. The number of settlements, roads, and ships a player may build is unchanged.