Base price: $22.
3 – 4 players.
Play time: ~75 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2

I ended up having a bit of a Work Disaster last week, so things have been thrown off course a little bit. That said, it’s a very exciting week for us post-PAX East: It’s CATAN week! What is CATAN Week? It’s a week that happens every so often where I try to review other CATAN games in my library. Mostly for kicks. Thankfully, I have exciting titles to tell y’all about. Ahead of the World Cup, I’m digging into this first one: CATAN: Soccer Fever! It’s a new scenario that adds a worldwide popular sport to a worldwide popular game. You love to see it. Curious as to what it’s all about? Let’s find out!

In CATAN: Soccer Fever, the island of Catan has been swept by the latest craze: soccer! Folks everywhere are setting up nets and kicking and completely forgetting that you did come here to settle and like, start a new life, and if you don’t get food you’ll starve. That brings the mood down but at leas gives you time to prepare. What you decide on is soccer courts and match days. The match days will be almost like a barn-raising to boot: everyone participates! So grab a ball, teach a sheep to corner kick and get ready: we’re going all in on soccer!

Contents

• Setup
• Gameplay
• Player Count Differences
• Strategy
• Pros, Mehs, Cons
• Overall

Setup

First, assemble the soccer balls and set aside the various tokens:

You can separate them by color, if you want. Then, assemble the CATAN hex board, removing the desert. Instead, place a soccer field in the center:

The other one is placed after you’ve placed the numbers. Move the 2 to the 12, and then replace the now-empty tile with a new soccer field. If this means. you’d remove a quarry or a hills tile from the game, instead roll some dice and move the corresponding number to this spot, then replace that one with a soccer field, following those previous rules. The robber can be set aside, for now.

Place the board and the goal nearby the play area:

The board is double-sided: use the appropriate one for your player count:

Place the League Tracker at the top of the green column:

Then, set up as normal. If you place a settlement on a soccer field, you can get an extra Shot Token. If you place both, you get one for each one. So that’s cool. You should be about ready to start, at this point:

Gameplay

So, Soccer Fever. It actually, for the most part, plays somewhat normally, with Shot Tokens being how you interact with the expansion content. If you build a City or a Settlement on a soccer pitch, you gain a shot token.

The actual competition element occurst whenever a Settlement or a City is built, Match Day occurs! During Match Day, players go head-to-head to determine the rankings for next year. The League Tracker determines who plays who. To actually go head-to-head for serious, each player rolls their soccer ball. If it lands colorful-side up, that’s a point! Otherwise, nothing. The player with more points wins the match and advances their token two spaces on the board. If it’s a tie, each player gets one point to advance with on the board.

As you advance, there are perks and free things available as well. You can also spend a Knight the turn after buying a Development card to add him as another Shot Token, if you’d like. He becomes a referee. The Soccer Fever claims another.

After 12 (16 with four players) matches, the scores are locked in and each player gets extra VP assigned. Except for the last person in a four-player game. They just get to be part of it. One edit here, as well: you play to 11 points now, instead of 10. Notably, the points are essentially considered part of a player’s score even if you haven’t hit the final match of the season. To help make that make sense, you now can only win at the end of your turn; if you build a City or Settlement, you have to play one final Match Day. Play until someone wins! Happy soccer!

Player Count Differences

The major difference comes down to how soccer works with different player counts. With four, there are more match days and whenever one comes around it’s one pair of players versus the other. Simple. With three, it’s significantly different. There are still two matches per match day, but one player plays both of their opponents. After their first match, they can lock in the results for themselves or void them; either way, they have to play their second match. Their opponent in the first match has their result locked in either way, and if they choose to lock in their first match’s results, their opponent for the second match still gets their result locked in after match two. So even if you win the first match, you still play the second so that your other opponent can get a result as well. I think that’s pretty smart, and it plays well. I’ve always found CATAN to be a bit crowded with four (there is no 5 / 6 expansion for this module, though you could likely imagine how it could work), and I think their implementation of the expansion content for three is a very good way to handle that player count. Still preferred at three, as a result. It really means that you get to play more soccer, and isn’t that what this is all about?

Strategy

• Building a settlement on soccer fields isn’t necessarily a losing argument. Getting more Shot Tokens can help you gain an edge in the matches, which is pretty much always good. It doesn’t guarantee that you’ll win, but you have more shots at points. Plus, sometimes that’s where you want to build for other resources as well.
• Just because you have more tokens doesn’t mean you’re going to always win. You have a roughly 50-50 shot of scoring a point every time you flip. As I said: more shots are better odds; they’re not a guarantee.
• Watch out for how those bonus points for matches can shift the balance of power. Since the leader gets 3 bonus VP, they might be much farther ahead of you than you think. It’s even worse if they have Development Cards, you can’t know for sure.
• Even if you have 11 VP, you do not win until the end of your turn, which will be after a Match Day if you just built a city or settlement. This is important. Just building a Settlement or City isn’t enough, because you might not still be in the lead after Match Day. Sometimes there are safer points.
• There’s some benefit to helping other players build cities or settlements, since those trigger Match Days. If you trade someone a resource and they use that to build a Settlement, fantastic. Now you can play more soccer and try to score those bonus points.
• Don’t be afraid to send a Knight or two to the soccer field. More Shot Tokens is explicitly good! It won’t win you the game, bur more Shot Tokens are a good idea. Just remember that Knights spent this way don’t count towards Largest Army, though, so remember that.
• You do get bonuses from winning matches, so it’s worth concentrating on that somewhat, but don’t forget to actually, you know, settle CATAN. The extra stuff you get is like, a resource and a development card. It’s not exactly worth a ton, but the extra points make up for it otherwise.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• You can get way too into soccer and completely lose track of actually playing CATAN, which is, I think, a very good sign. We spent so much time playing soccer in our first game; we laughed so much. Those are excellent signs of a fun time, I think if you give into the whimsical nature of the expansion you’ll enjoy how silly it is.
• It actually ended up making our games a bit more cooperative. Everyone was so excited for more soccer that they were readily trading to help other players get settlements and cities. Strategically optimal? Not really. Vaguely problematic as well.
• I appreciate all the deeply silly art and marketing they did for this one. I saw some shirts for it and just the art in the game itself is very funny. It’s weird to imagine the setters just loving it. Thowing it all away for soccer.
• Being able to spend knights to make them into soccer guys is deeply silly. I like to think they’re reffing the games with their armor still on.
• I appreciate that they specifically encourage players to add more house rules to make the game more fun. The game as written is a tiny bit flat, in terms of the actual soccer methodology. As a result, they added some more ways to make the soccer shot more challenging. Still fun, but I’ve been racking my brain for new house rules though, so, a bit of a complex feeling.
• It all folds down flat, which is very nice, though I would have liked it if it had fit in my game box. Might be a version compatibility thing; I’ll have to check with a 5E copy. Boxes change size with reckless abandon and sometimes not everything works. I appreciate the flat fold, even if it doesn’t work for my particular copy of CATAN. I have had it for like, 15 years.
• I like how the three-player version resolves, giving players a chance to redeem a bad round and spreading that around evenly. It adds an element of almost double-or-nothing, but it’s really more trying to bet and see if you have a better round 2 than round 1. Sometimes you know that it’s not worth it, which is tough, so you really need to lock in during round 1.

Mehs

• I didn’t realize this is technically incompatible with the fourth edition Settlers of Catan, which is what I own. My Soccer Fever tiles are just the tiniest bit smaller by comparison, so they slide around a bit.
• CATAN isn’t the smallest game; this will add even more of a space requirement to your play. There’s a whole goal and board that go to the left of the play area to play soccer and such. It significantly increases the footprint, but we made it work.
• I would have liked to see more integration, with like thematic tiles or special soccer-themed development cards or a referee outfit for the robber. It’s more of a missed opportunity than anything else, but I always like siller tiles and outfits if possible.

Cons

• Given that it can somewhat resolve down to just “flip a coin sometimes for points”, I do think the expansion could have been more whimsical. I just wanted a goalie or some shot clock or angles or placable obstacles if we were going to make it worth points, to some degree. If you want to travel with this or don’t want to bring the scenario booklet with you, then you can also use the Shot Tokens and just flip them to determine how you score in a matchup. That’s even less fun.

Overall: 8.5 / 10

Overall, CATAN: Soccer Fever is a fantastic scenario that genuinely reignited my enjoyment of CATAN. Is it as in-depth and thorough as I’d like? Not necessarily. Does it add some unbeatable layer of strategy that really engages my brain? No. But is it whimsical? Yes, very much so, and I think, for a few of my groups, having that reinforcement to calm down and enjoy the game for the game’s sake is always a good idea. I cut my teeth on CATAN when I was in college and getting into modern games, and I think that we always had more fun when it wasn’t particularly cutthroat. Here, there’s still a novel sense of competition, but it’s so silly and enjoyable that we ended up cooperating more outside of it to try and help players build new Cities and Settlements to play more soccer. The soccer itself is fine; while I appreciate that they let you add in house rules, I do wish the actual gameplay element of it were a bit more complex, given how many different great dexterity games I play regularly. It’s essentially just a fancy coin flip but using a multi-colored cardboard ball in lieu of a coin. The fun for me comes in best as you’re trying to manage the multi-round competition of it all. Are you working to give yourself more shots per game? Are you just enjoying the ride and not taking it that seriously? Or are you considering how likely you are to beat your first opponent and trying to see how your second opponent will measure up (in a three-player game)? There’s plenty of options. For the general vibe of the soccer game being a bit perfunctory, I’m not sure why the expansion is so large, but it does add a certain amount of visual appeal to the experience. I’m a big fan. If you’re getting hyped for the World Cup, you love soccer, or you just correctly think CATAN should lock in on more whimsical expansions, CATAN: Soccer Fever might be just what you need to play!

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