This 2nd edition seems to have photographs on the tiles for the different terrain and photos of sheep, brick, trees, grain and stone for the different trade items.

I enjoyed the game so much that I went to buy another version to make a bigger island to let more people play, but alas, they had redesigned the game pieces :(

Now the game featured drawings instead of photos. The game was more or less unchanged, except now there were fewer development cards and there were effectively now two rulebooks. The 8 page one gave the basic rules and the Almanac gave an in depth look at the rules. Missing was the alternate setups for more players. I bought it anyway, along with Seafarers of Catan. I'm glad I did.

So what do we have here after all that preamble? (;

Settlers is a game that is pretty much guaranteed to be different each time. The terrain tiles (made of stout card) are shuffled and placed to form a large hexagon, three tiles to each side. Onto these are placed die cut numbered tokens in a spiral pattern. Each player then takes a set of wooden pieces in their colour and places a road and settlement piece on the 'board' by placing the settlement on the intersection of two or three tiles, while road pieces are placed along the edge where two tiles lie side by side. Playing pieces are never placed actually within a tile.

Each turn the dice are rolled. The number rolled is compared to the number tokens on the board and that terrain produces resources for whichever players have settlements on the edge of the terrain. As settlements cannot be alongside each other, only a maximum of three settlements can gain from any one terrain tile.

Having collected resources, the active player can then trade with the other players to try and obtain the combination of resources they want. Certain combinations benefit in specific ways:
Brick and lumber are needed to build a road
Brick, lumber, wool and Grain are needed to build a settlement
3 Ore and 2 Grain are needed to build a city
Ore, Wool and Grain are needed to buy a Development Card

A city is built to replace a settlement and benefits the player by producing two resources instead of one when the terrain its adjacent to has its number rolled.
Development cards have varying benefits, such as allowing you to monopolise all of one resource by collecting in all the players resources of that type. Or allows you to build two roads for free.

The crux of the game is that you can rarely cover all the resources with your settlements. Therefore, the only way that you can get the resources you need is through trading with the other players, who also have the same problem. Trading your surplus will no doubt help them get a vital settlement or whatever, but hopefully the trade will benefit you in a similar way also. Good stuff!

Scoring is simple. 1 point per settlement, 2 for a city. Victory points can also be gained from the Development card deck. First player to 10 or more points wins.

The spanner in the works is the Robber. As the game uses two dice, 7 is generally regarded as the most common number you can throw on two dice. Throw a 7 and the robber has to be moved. Whichever tile he is moved onto shuts that tile down until he leaves. In addition, he also reduces every players hand down to 7 cards and the player placing him on a terrain hex gets to steal a card from any player with a settlement adjacent to that tile.
With it being a seven, he should appear often. Well, either the dice are weighted or statisticians don't know what they are talking about. I've had games where the Robber has hardly ever been used, other games where the Robber has gone sailing across the room in sheer frustration with him disrupting the game with a 7 having been rolled so often.

This is a superb little game. I like to try and cover as many different numbers as I can. It's all well and good going for the popular numbers such as 6 or 8 but if these numbers aren't coming up as they should - and we've had games where 3 or 10 come up more often - then it's a better policy to try and cover as many different numbers as you can. Plus, if 6 and 8 happen to be tree or brick, you can find yourself laden with them. You can trade with other players, of course, or in the ports at 3 to 1 (or 2 to 1 if its a specific resource port), but that can leave you with a problem in the end game, when you need grain and ore to build those cities for the victory points.

. SUMMARY:
This is definitely almost the epitome of what is making German games so popular. Simple rules, but with loads of strategy and gaming possibilities as well as lots of player interaction. It deservedly won Game of the Year in 1995, and it can't come more highly recommended than that.

Review by Brian