Board Game Resource Comprehensive Review – Catan: Explorers and Pirates

The first thing that will likely go through your head when you see the Explorers and Pirates board assembled is “WHAT on earth is this Catan that I’m looking at?” Indeed, E&P has a handful of new mechanics that deeply change the nature of the game, and it’s immediately apparent from the moment you get your first look at the game. E&P’s added mechanics are as follows:

Ships

The ships are what make E&P unique; everything revolves around them. These are not the little boats in Seafarers, they function like real ships and can both travel and move cargo. A boat costs a wood and a sheep, and can be built from a harbor settlement, which is a special coastal settlement that’s just shy under the cost of a city. After the trading/building phase, E&P introduces a new phase, the ship-moving phase.

In this phase, players, well, move ships. Every ship has four movement points. The ships are placed on the straight lines between hexes, similar to roads, and moving them from one line to another is one point. Ships may move straight four times, make turns, go forward and backwards, whatever tickles their fancy. Ships can be used both to explore and to ferry cargo, which makes up the majority of E&P’s gameplay.

Exploring

Why build a ship, if not to explore? On the ship-moving phase, players can set out to the unexplored seas. Should the ship end up adjacent to an unexplored tile (the tiles marked with sun and moon icons), that tile is immediately turned over, and the ship ends its movement for that round.

The revealed tile could be one of five things – a blank sea tile, a traditional resource tile, a pirate lair, a fish shoal, or a spice colony. The latter three tiles are new and unique to E&P, and will be expanded upon below under “missions.”

Cargo

Players can load cargo onto their ships, which can be moved around the board. Each cargo serves its own purpose, but the most familiar to players would be the settler. The settler costs the exact same as a normal settlement, only instead of being built on land, it’s placed on a boat. When a boat drops off a settler, it immediately converts into a proper settlement, implying that the boat’s passengers found some permanent residence. This allows you to build settlements on distant lands without having to connect them via roads like in traditional Catan, and makes exploring all the more enticing.

Other types of cargo include crew members, fish, and spices, which will be elaborated on below.

Missions

E&P has three different “missions” that you can have in play, which are basically passive objectives that will earn you points should you choose to pursue them. You can play with all of the missions, none of them, or a combination. By completing the objective in each mission, you’ll move up on its respective victory point track. This gives you something more to focus on than simply settling and trading, as is the case in the base version of Catan.

Pirate Lairs

Exploring a hex might reveal a gold hex, which can give you two gold pieces every time its number is rolled (essentially a free resource of your choice)! Whoo-hoo! Only, there’s a catch—scurvy pirates have claimed it for themselves, and you’ll have to get rid of them to claim the tile.

To get around this, you can build crew members from a harbor settlement. If a ship is adjacent to the settlement, the crew members can be placed on the boat, and they can be released onto an adjacent hex should the boat want to dump them off. Placing enough crews on the gold hexes will defeat the pirates, opening the hex up for settlement. Players can combine in this effort; the crew members need not all be the same color. Whoever contributes the most to defeating the pirates gets a point bonus.

Fish Shoals

A fish shoal is a tile that shows fish, surrounding a certain die number. Players may choose to “roll for fish” during their turns, and if they roll a number that matches any fish shoal on the board, that hex will spawn a fish that can be carried around by players on their ships.

By taking a fish to the “Council of Catan,” an off-shore hex near the mainland, players can earn points. The more fish you bring back, the higher up you’ll move on the VP scoring for fish shoals.

Spice Villages

These hexes reveal local friendly tribes that have spices for trade. If you leave a crew member on their hex, you can pick up a spice bag, and load it onto your ship. By leaving a crew member, you’ve established diplomatic relations with the tribe, and you’ll benefit from a permanent, passive effect for the rest of your game. Each spice hex yields its own reward, such as an additional movement point for ships on the move phase.

Just like the fish, you can bring the spices back to the Council of Catan, which will bump you up in victory points. In this sense, the spice villages’ rewards are two-fold—you’ll get the passive ability, and points for your effort.

Gold Pieces

Gold pieces are in this game, and trading in two during one of your turns will allow you to pick a resource of your choice. However, there’s something much more important about this mechanic: when a number rolls that you’re not producing on, you get a gold piece for free. What this means is that, for every two non-productive rolls gives you a resource of your choice. This is one of the best mechanics that’s ever been made for Catan, and should be played regardless of what expansions you own.

Essentially, this eliminates the “no-production” problem that players can have when they’re either not wise enough to choose good numbers, or if the good numbers you picked just happen to not ever roll. Ever had that game where 6 gets rolled twice, and then 11 gets rolled thirty times? This means that, regardless of where you are, you’re producing, and it’s a good thing. I love this mechanic, and can’t go back to playing Catan without it.

Pirate Ships               

Remember the no-good, dirty rotten robber that you love to hate? Good news, he’s gone! There is no robber in Catan. Hold up, don’t get too happy just yet; the robber is replaced by a new pirate ship mechanic.

When a player rolls a 7, they can place a pirate ship anywhere on the board, which functions as sort of a toll bridge for other players. In passing through that hex, they must pay a gold tribute, or they can’t go through. The difference here is that the pirate ship belongs to the player who rolled a 7, so you have the chance to put your own ship on the board, rather than some black, faceless robber.

Variants

These mechanics make up the core of E&P. However, this expansion offers five different variants. Unlike Traders and Barbarians, which has five variants that are wildly different from each other, E&P’s variants essentially stack on top of each other until you reach the final one, which is simply all of them combined into a single game. In this sense, all of the variants are compatible with each other, and the game feels like it was designed for you to play the final one where everything is included. The first one, for example, is so simple that it doesn’t feel like much more than a glorified tutorial. That being said, the game encourages you to play the one that appeals to you the most.

The first variant, “Land-Ho,” introduces the boats and exploration, nothing more. The second, “Pirate Lairs,” adds the pirate mission. The next adds fish on-top of this, and the fourth combines fish with spices, but leaves out the pirate lairs. The fifth and final, the titular “Explorers and Pirates,” combines all of these together.

No cities

Cities are not present in any of E&P’s variants. To be completely honest, I have no idea why. The game is designed to make you focus on the ships, but given the design of the game, having cities as an available option doesn’t seem like it would take away from anything. The only thing I can think of is that cities are similar to harbor settlements in price, and

that players might opt to build cities instead of harbors, thus taking away from the intent of the game. This doesn’t hold up well though; building a city instead of a harbor would be a tactical choice.

Of course, this is amended quite easily…by the players saying “let’s play with cities.” Given that you have the pieces for it already, it’s not exactly a hard house-rule to implement if the thought of a city-less Catan is abhorrent to you.

Well, this is a tricky one to answer, because it totally comes down to what your taste is. Explorers and Pirates shakes up Catan like no other expansion before it, and to be honest, it often feels like a different game.

This puts E&P in a weird spot – if you love Catan, will you end up having fun playing an expansion that departs so far from the fundamentals? On the other hand, if you’re looking to change the experience, would you get more utility out of just buying a whole new game altogether? These are questions you’ll have to ask yourself before you buy the game, but I’ll attempt to answer them as earnestly as possible.

But, let’s get one thing out of the way: Explorers and Pirates is fun. Regardless of whether or not it provides enough value for you, the game itself is fun to play. There’s a change in focus in this game; instead of settling and trading, the biggest part of your game will be using your boats effectively and moving goods. This ends up being a very tactical part of the game, and it adds a little bit more real-time action into Catan, which is normally a game where you’re expanding slowly over the course of several turns at a time.

With the right players, using the right variants, I highly enjoyed Explorers and Pirates. It expands upon Catan in a way that creates a totally different experience, but still retains core Catan elements. On the other hand, it avoids some of the problems that other expansions have created. Cities and Knights is by far my favorite Catan expansion, but a few people in our group lost the desire to play it due to how much longer it can make the game.

The right game of Explorers and Pirates can play out in forty five minutes to an hour, and it gives you a nice dose of Catan, but in a form that’s much more tactical than the vanilla game, which admittedly, many people have gotten bored of after so many years. E&P shakes things up, and it shakes them up a lot. I found that the game had strong appeal to members in our group who loved Catan but didn’t like Cities and Knights. For them, it made the game different enough to be refreshing, while not making it overly heavy.

I can’t state enough, however, how much this does change the feel of the game. Major elements of Catan are severely downplayed here. The starting isle is always the same island, down to resources and numbers (although there isn’t any reason why players couldn’t change this if they wished), and boats can do a whole lot for you in the way of getting points. Since there is so much you’re able to do with your boats, I found that trading and settling played a much smaller role in the game.

Your boats need to be paid for only once, and two out of the four cargo options don’t require resources, so it’s easy to score points with your boats without even having to build. I found that there was a lot less trading, because players often already had what they needed, or otherwise had gold pieces to get their own resources.

Also, depending on what scenario you’re playing with, a lot of times the unexplored hexes don’t form particularly big islands. Usually, it’s more worth it to just plop down coastal settlements with your ships all over the place instead of actually building inwards, which also downplayed the importance of wood and clay, your road resources. Clay in particular feels particularly weak in E&P where you just don’t use roads very often.

Finally, the fun factor of E&P depends greatly on which variant you’ll playing. As I’ve said, the variants simply stack on to one another, so it really just comes down to which ones you want to play with. I found E&P to be highly enjoyable with one to two variants in play. This allows players to rely less on victory points solely through their boats, and encourages a little bit more settling and trading.

With all three scenarios in play at once, I feel like the game become overly bloated and needlessly convoluted. It’s also worth mentioning that analysis paralysis can destroy your game if you’re playing with all of the variants together. It reaches the point where there’s just so much you can do with your ships that it feels like a math equation, and if you’ve got players that overthink, this can really start to take a toll on the game. Our first game with everything together took four hours because of this, far longer than any game of Catan should ever take.

It’s a staple of euros to offer plenty of choices and paths to victory, but in the case of everything together, it often felt like it was working against the game rather than for it. If you pick and choose your variants, however, the game can be an absolute delight. And who knows—perhaps the complete package is right for your group; the only way to find out is to try it.

Ultimately, E&P is in a pretty weird position. It deviates so much from the base game that it might be too much of a change for players who want to retain the original Catan feel, while it’s also different enough that playing another game entirely might be a more enticing option for players. Whatever your perceived value of E&P is, I can at least say that it’s fun to play. Take that however you will.

This varies greatly, depending on which scenarios you choose to play with, and how prone your group is to analysis paralysis. With one or two variants, the game is simple and yet complex enough to be a fun challenge that doesn’t require intense analyzation, which allows the game to flow more quickly. Many of these games (barring setup time) actually played out between 30 minutes and an hour. This is very generous, and for casual players who love Catan but are intimidated by heavier games, this can be a perfect expansionary solution for them, as opposed to Cities and Knights, which many complain elongates the game too much (I personally disagree, but to each their own).

This gets a lot trickier when you play with all the variants together. The map becomes so huge and there are so many options that deciding what to do with your boat can be a puzzle unto itself. If people overthink on this, you’re going to be in trouble. Catan is a game that offers little to do while others are taking their turns, and if each player site there ruminating, you might as well grab some popcorn and put a movie on because you might be there for a while. With all the variants together, the game (for us) averaged at an hour and a half to two and a half hours, though it can easily go over that if analysis paralysis is in play. If you want your game to end at a decent time, make sure players are thinking about their turn in advance.

Although the game departs significantly from what we’re familiar with in Catan, it’s not particularly hard to learn and teach. The rulebook does a good job of explaining everything, and the concepts are relatively easy to pick up, especially when they’re being taught by somebody else. I would, however, recommend adding the variants in one at a time over a few sessions like the game suggests; unless your group is made of seasoned gamers, it can be overwhelming seeing all of the options you have with your boats and remembering all of them correctly on your first game.

E&P, as I said above, really downplays the importance of trading, which affects interaction. Not only do you just not need to trade as much (in most games), the gold piece mechanic also provides a means for you to obtain your own resources of your choice. If you LOVE the trading aspect of Catan, ye be warned—it just doesn’t feel as strong in this game.

That’s not to say there’s not good interaction. There are plenty of ways to compete directly with your opponents, more so than you’ll find in base Catan. Your pirate ship allows you to setup toll lanes which will require your opponents to fork up money or calculate different routes. Speaking of pirates, players who pitch in the most to topple pirate lairs will get more for their money, so you might often find yourself racing to certain islands to get a jump on your opponents. There’s also the fish, which spawn on certain hexes, one at a time. These fish can be picked up by any player, so you’ll have to be wise if you want to get there first.

The boats add an interesting element of interaction that’s absent in Catan, given that they can actually move around. There are plenty of situations where you can temporarily impede your opponent’s progress, which is a nice change from Catan, where everything is permanent.

What a change this is from your normal games of Catan! Let’s get one thing straight: it’s all about the boats. Yes, you can expand. Yes, you should expand. Yes, you want the best numbers and you’ll want to trade and so forth, but the biggest difference I found between this and base Catan is that everything you do, you do for your boats. This isn’t a game you win by just placing enough settlements to reach the point line, like in the other versions of Catan.

There are plenty of ways to get points with your ships, and if you don’t use them, you’ll be dead in the water. If you see a valuable rock hex, you’ll want to claim it, not for cities (which don’t exist in E&P, though I don’t see why they couldn’t) but for crew members, which cost a rock and sheep to build. Why do you want crew members? You want to leave them on pirate lairs on spice hexes. Why do you want a spice hex? You want a passive benefit to make your ships move faster so you can take over pirate lairs and move fish more quickly. Why do you want fish? They give you victory points and require no resources.

Essentially, the boats are the game, and the game comes down to how clever you are in getting maximum utility out of them. Every action will likely be made with the goal of making your boat strategy more effective, and the actual boat-moving phase is where most of your big decisions are made.

This is accentuated by the fact that your starting settlements require that you place on the coast. You still have the option to choose where you start, but one of those MUST be on the cost, and the starting board is designed to where each coastal spot is equal You’ll also start off with a boat and a settler off the bat

As far as your boats go, there are so many decisions to be made. First of all, exploring is a high priority, not only because the islands will end up dictating your strategy, but also because of the rewards that are inherent in exploring Uncovering a new hex will either grant you its respective resource, or two gold pieces (which can be traded for a resource of your choice). A clever player might strive to uncover the hexes as quickly as possible to get more net-gain than their opponents.

That’s where things start to get tactical—if Red decides to use his first boat to rush out first-thing in order to discover as many islands as possible, he’s using his starter boat, which has a settler packed on. Once this settler is used, the boat disappears. By moving around and discovering, he’s delaying his first placement, potentially neglecting himself of production. If blue decides to leave his boat behind and wait for Red to uncover the good stuff, he might load a boat with a settler and cash-in on Red’s discoveries.

However, if Red discovered several islands, he may have obtained some good resources in the process; he could conceivably have enough to build a new boat and push it out with a settler in the time that it took blue to build his. In this case, Red now has a ship in the same place as blue, but also has his other ship free to do his bidding, which puts red at an advantage. This is an example of how important it is to make sure you’re getting max utility out of your ships. It’s an efficiency game, and wasteful players will fall behind.

Once the islands are discovered, it’s quite the tactical exercise deciding what to do with your ships. See, you’re not limited to one thing. A ship carrying two crew members could dump them off on one spot, or both of them off on different hexes. In one ship movement, you might drop one crew member off on a pirate lair, dump the other one on a spice colony, take a spice bag in return, pick up another crew member off a different lair, and move forward towards the Council of Catan to drop your goods. Maybe before you do that, you’ll want to drop off the newly picked up crew member on another spice hex to double up on your load, allowing you to deliver to spice bags at once to the council.

That’s an example of what you can do in one turn, with one boat. Imagine, then, how many possibilities you’ll have when you have all three of your ships working on your board, with the islands fully explored, and other opponents/pirate ships to deal with. There are a lot of decisions to be made, and people who love choices won’t be let down.

Overall, this is way more tactical than base Catan, so even if this game does feel different, if you’re looking for a fresh Catan experience that demands a lot more thinking on your feet, E&P offers that in spades. Fortunately, the modular design allows you to tweak the game to be as deep as you want it to be.

E&P is weird, because it mitigates some of the biggest luck-related issues that have been a problem in Catan, but introduces several more in their place.

The issue of being screwed over by dice is far less of an issue here, due to the brilliant gold piece system that compensates you when your numbers aren’t rolled. In case you skipped that part of the review, the game gives you one gold piece every time a number rolls that you’re not on. Two gold pieces can be traded for one resource of your choice on your turn. This effectively means that, for every two turns of non-production, you get a resource. I’ve already mentioned that this is a wonderful mechanic and it’s hard for me to play any version of Catan without it now.

The “luck” of starting settlements is also mitigated in this. While “luck” isn’t entirely appropriate to describe starting settlements (it takes a great deal of strategy to choose the right ones), it’s not impossible for players to get the short end of the stick sometimes in base Catan. Sometimes, in the base game, whether it’s due to bad decision-making or plain bad luck, a player might end up boxed in from the get-go, making for a pretty miserable game overall. The pre-placed starting settlement mechanic in E&P avoids this problem.

It’s not all good news though—while your starting placements and dice luck are improved, you’re now introduced to the luck of the draw when it comes to exploration. The island tiles are randomly placed, and their numbers randomly distributed. While the game is designed to provide a balanced setup when everything is said and done, some players will just get luckier than others. A player who discovers a “2” tile of the most abundant resource, for example, is less well-off than a player who discovers an “8” of the most abundant one. Given that the game allows you to dump a settlement on the tile as soon as you discover it (if you have a settler on board), this can give some strong early-game advantages under the right (or wrong?) circumstances.

However, I didn’t find the luck of the draw to be very game-breaking. Even if a player can snatch up an island right when they take it, it’s usually possible for an opponent to take another spot on the hex, especially if they’re in-tow with a settler themselves. Furthermore, settling is arguably less important in this game, and a player that uses his resources to settle on a good spot might be passed up by a player that opts to keep exploring and focuses on fulfilling ship missions.

Settling is obviously very important, but ultimately I found that every tile has something to offer, and the game is designed in such a way to allow the players to share the benefits of good hexes, regardless of who discovered them.

For players who don’t enjoy the luck of the draw, the game can always be played without exploration. This goes against the spirit of the design, but starting the game with an uncovered board would allow everyone to be on equal footing from the game’s outset. I’ve played like this a few times, and I very much enjoyed it.

Despite the luck of the draw of the island tiles, I would honestly argue that this game has less luck than the base Catan game. The gold piece mechanic goes a long way for this, but overall it seems like the game was designed to “fix” some of the more criticized luck-based elements of Catan, and for the most part, it succeeds. People who have become frustrated with Catan over the years might find want to give E&P a chance, as it mends some of the game’s main problems.

E&P feels pretty balanced to me—I haven’t encountered anything that’s particularly game-breaking. This might have not been the case, if careful design hadn’t gone into the unexplored islands. There’s a reason why the “sun” and “moon” tiles exist; they’re there to make sure that the islands are balanced, no matter how they end up getting revealed. You’ll never end up in a scenario where the top half of the board is loaded with treasure with a stinky bottom half; there’s something to offer everywhere you go.

Say what you will about Catan, but Klaus Teuber has always had a knack for keeping things balanced, at least as far as his pre-made setups go. If you follow the guidelines in the rules when you set up the board, everyone is pretty much sharing the same odds.

As per usual, this expansion supports up to four players, with an option for a $20 ($30 MSRP) 5-6 player extension, which I’ve lovingly shared my thoughts about here. The game scales about as well as Catan does. It’s more specious and flows faster with less players, and is lengthier, as well as more crowded and competitive with more.

Explorers and Pirates feels like a different game than base Catan. I’ve found, in the board gaming world, there are two different schools of thought for expansions—packages that add small mechanics that slightly change the game (that are also compatible and modular), and expansions that put an entire new twist on the game, going as far as to change its fundamental nature. The Catan expansions have always been the latter; each game, with the exception of perhaps Seafarers (which is really just a glorified package for a bigger board) feels like something totally different. Explorers and Pirates goes all the way in this regard, and takes the basic principles of Catan and turns it into a game with an entirely different focus.

This is E&P’s biggest strength and weakness.

E&P is fun. I enjoyed playing it, and it feels quite different from any other game in my collection right now. However, given how different the game is, it makes me wonder, “who is this game for?”  People that like the fundamentals of Catan might find the degree of change jarring, while most people who are looking for something different have already moved on to other games. I don’t see very much discussion online about E&P. Despite the fact that it’s been out for a few years now, it still seems like a phantom among board gaming communities, and this could be one reason why. It’s right in the middle of two different camps, and I admit that I was hesitant to try it out because of how different it looked. Had I not received it as a gift, I’m not sure if I would have taken the plunge on something so risky.

My conclusion is that Explorers and Pirates will appeal the most to die-hard Catan fans. There are plenty of groups out there who have gone all-in on Catan, who either haven’t moved on to other designer games, or who have, while still keeping Catan in their hearts. If you love Catan and you’re always wanting more of it, you’ll enjoy Explorers and Pirates. If you’re afraid of how different the game looks, then I advise you to read this review carefully and make your own call as to whether it merits your purchase. Finally, the game might appeal to those who have been disenfranchised with Catan. It fixes some of the base game’s most criticized problems, and adds a sense of decision-making and strategy that is common among popular euros/designer games today.

Catan’s expansions have followed a strange pattern—the first two, Seafarers and Cities and Knights, were completely compatible, both with each other and with the base game. This changed with Traders and Barbarians, which offered a more self-contained experience that offered plenty of variety within its own box, but greatly prohibited the degree to which the other expansions could work with it. E&P, in this regard, is more similar to T&B. The game feels designed to be played on its own. Certain elements, such as no cities, pre-made starting settlements and so on, go against the nature of Catan’s other offerings.

On the official Catan website, there are official arrangements on how to implement other expansions into the game. Seafarers is incompatible, given that E&P makes it irrelevant, but Cities and Knights and Traders and Barbarians can be worked in.

Cities and Knights can be cleanly implemented if the online instructions are followed. C&K + Seafarers is one of our favorite combinations, and C&K provides universal mechanics that aren’t limited to the size of the board. Although combining with E&P makes things quite a bit more convoluted, it still works. I haven’t gotten to try this combination as much as I would like to, unfortunately.

It gets a bit more tricky with T&B. The official website basically says that three of its five scenarios are possible in theory, but only one of those (the Fisherman of Catan) is cleanly implemented, while the other two (the Rivers of Catan and the Caravans) could work, but are limited by the size of the starting island. These can be cumbersome, as they were designed to work with the full-size board.

I ultimately found that E&P can combine very well if you resort to unofficial methods. We, for example, enjoyed taking the exploration out of the game, opting to set up a board similar to traditional Seafarers, but with the E&P mechanics implemented, along with one or two of the boat missions implemented, along with Cities and Knights. This offered a similar experience to what we knew and loved, but added in some of the enjoyable aspects of T&B without changing the entire fundamental focus of the game. Of course, this is all up to you, and should you decide to house-rule it, you’ll be confronted with some balancing issues that you and your group will have to figure out yourselves.

Overall, compatibility here is, well, cumbersome, but it’s not impossible.

I’d argue this is just as replayable as Catan is in any of its other iterations. You’re likely familiar with how much you like to bring Catan to your table at this point, and this one should be no different. One slightly weaker point here is the fact that the starting island is static, but the unexplored areas will be different every game, and not to mention the game does give you the option of randomly placing the starting island, albeit with static numbers and settlement placements.

E&P shares the same cost as its other expansion brethren, available for about $50 MSRP and $40 online. If you’re familiar with other Catan expansions, there’s nothing new to see here, including the exuberant charge for its respective 5-6 player add-on. If you found any of the other expansions to be worth the asking price, this one will be worthy of your table.