Catan Histories: Merchants of Europe

Today's review is of the 2011 release, Catan Histories: Merchants of Europe.  For 3-4 players, it takes 120 minutes.

Overview
If you know Catan, you'll pick this up quickly.  Same basic concept: you place your trading posts on hex corners.  Each turn, the active player rolls the dice, and everyone who has a trading post on hexes matching that number gets the specified resource.  You use resources to recruit (and move) merchants (who turn into trading posts on empty corners), build caravans (to move your commodity tokens to other players' trading posts), etc. You win if you're the first to deliver all your commodity tokens.

game board; image from here

Review
I like Catan, but don't think it's great.  This variant is mildly better- I like the changes they made.  The rule changes, the mildly historical flavor- good stuff.  But it still suffers from the inherent "initial state" problem in all Catan games- your initial placement of trading posts goes so far in determining the winner, and the dice rolls determine resources (and therefore, everything).  So it has the same good and bad of its ancestor.

Rating: B+