strategizing against the leader with varying degrees of success. And while my first game ran too long (over two and a half hours), subsequent play has confirmed that this reflected a combination of reading the rules (conveniently provided in German and English, learning the ropes, and the fact that the winds were just not blowing that strongly most of the game. The learning curve is actually pretty quick and aided by the fact that the cards and the board contain almost no text.
      The only real downside is the quality of the components. The artwork on the board and the cards is functional and clear but otherwise unnoteworthy. While the balloons, the corresponding altitude markers, and resources are made of sturdy plastic, the board is a folded sheet of laminated paper and the cards come out of the box as well-perforated but unlaminated sheets of medium stock paper. After just a few plays the cards are already showing some wear and tear that makes me wish I had put them in card protectors sooner. But these are minor problems compared to the fun to be had finding productive uses for hot air. I, for one, am encouraged to see the quality small presses emerge and look forward to seeing what Philip Vogt and Richard Heli come up with next.

      David Sidore is a German Game enthusiast who occasionally contributes reviews to The Game Report. He's the founder of a new gaming group in the Macon, GA area and a regular online in Playlink's Blocktionary rooms.

STARFARERS OF CATAN
a review by Darrell Hanning

"And did we tell you the name of the game, boys? It's called Riding the Gravy Train..." - Pink Floyd, 1975

      It must be the apogee of self-vindication, to be granted a generous component budget for your next game design. There's no doubt that Klaus Teuber deserved it (but then I think that of many designers), after the resounding success of the SETTLERS saga.
      STARFARERS OF CATAN [Die Sternenfahrer von Catan -ed] is the latest effort to capitalize on the SETTLERS OF CATAN name. It is a big box. It is a heavy box. And for an interstellar colonization game, it is incredibly light fare. This is fine, as it is a German-style game, and one therefore expects (if not demands) a rulebook less massive and less involved than other forms of literature - such as, say, the Girl Scout cookie catalog.
      And so we get 7 inch-tall, Flash Gordon spaceships, with all sorts of surrealistic augmentations, big cards, little cards, more little cards, and enough plastic player pieces to bring a tear to the eye of every GAMEMASTER series fan. The greatest irony of all, though (at least to the American consumers of such games), may be that one of the most expensive German-style games to come out has all of four wooden pieces.
      STARFARERS OF CATAN contains a plethora of components. There is a large, 33" x 22" game board, 22 plastic colony, trade center, spaceport, and transport pieces for each player, 32 large event cards, 20 alien race cards, 20 cards each of five resources, 4 "motherships" (as mentioned above), 108 cannons, cargo rings, engines, and fame rings for said motherships, 38 planet chits, 4 alien race counters, and 4 victory point markers. Oh, we also get a STARFARERS OF CATAN Almanac. Like the rest of the game, it's printed in German. My copy of the game came with a rules and card translation compiled by Peter Card. Without this translation, the average American hasn't a snowball's chance of learning this game, and so we are greatly indebted to Mr. Card for his painstaking effort to make this game accessible to those of us in the English-speaking world. We may not usually give much thought to the fact that someone has translated a foreign game for us, but their time-consuming labor is the only thing which permits these games to be played by most of us. Thank you, Mr. Card, and thanks to all people who have made similar efforts for other games.
      The object of the game is to be the first to collect 15 victory points, and players collect victory points by placing colonies on "colony points" between planets, spaceports at colonies, trade centers with the alien races, and upgrading your mothership (i.e., collecting fame rings, building cargo rings and cannons). The sequence of play is uncluttered - the current player first rolls two dice for production. Like the original Settlers, this total indicates where resources are produced, and each player having a colony adjacent to an eligible planet collects one card of that resource type. Then comes the Building and Trade phase, in which the current player can trade resource cards with other players (or exchange at 3:1 with the "Galactic Bank" - 2:1 for the Trade Goods resource), and use their resource cards for building new colony and trade ships, building spaceports at existing colonies, and/or upgrading their mothership. Then the current player vigorously shakes his mothership, and looks to see which two, colored balls pop into the transparent plug at the bottom of the ship. A blue ball is worth 1 movement point, yellow is worth 2, and red is

worth 3. If either ball is black, the user will have a basic movement allowance of 3, after resolving the event triggered by the presence of a black ball. If neither ball is black, the values of the two are added together to get the player's basic movement allowance for that turn. In either case, the player's basic movement allowance can be augmented with additional engines on the mothership, and by certain, alien race cards. Rather than moving from hex to hex on the board, players move from point to point; i.e., from one conjunction of two hexsides to an adjacent conjunction. Players move their colony ships to the systems in the middle of the board, flipping over planet chits, and deciding whether to deposit their colony at one of the "colony points". Trade ships move to one of the five "trade points" surrounding one of the four alien races. The first trade ship to visit an alien race moves to the first point, the second moves to point two, and so on. A mothership must have as many cargo rings attached to it as the number of the trade point to which you move. (That is, the first player to visit a race must have at least one cargo ring on his mothership, the second player must have at least two cargo rings on his mothership, etc.) Being the first to place a trade center with an alien race gives you the corresponding alien counter and 2 victory points. Having more trade centers with an alien race than any other player also gives you the alien counter (and its 2 victory points), in which case both the counter and the points are taken away from the previous holder.
      STARFARERS is perhaps the epitome of gimmickry for the adult strategy game arena (a certain, Dutch auction clock notwithstanding). We slap laser cannons and engines on our cheesy spacecraft with the enthusiasm that we used to slap Holly carburetors on our '68 Camaros. We plop smaller (but equally cheesy) spaceships on top of odd, plastic blobs to create "colony ships", and imagine ourselves whipping our figurative horses in a wagon train to the stars. The only thing that seems to be missing from this picture is the buxom space-maiden in distress...
      Don't get me wrong - STARFARERS is not a bad game. I enjoy playing it; I just don't enjoy it as much as I think I should, considering how much development money and effort has obviously gone into it. It reminds me of the next, big-budget, action-packed movie sequel selling itself as "bigger, better, and more exciting than the original". STARFARERS is to the original SETTLERS as Lucas' Star Wars Episode I is to any of the original 3. When this throw-more-money-at-it approach usually fails in other parts of the social spectrum (such as movies, government, and public education), and then also fails (to a certain extent) in the gaming arena, I have to wonder if there isn't some universal law of diminishing returns.
      STARFARERS is not content to move what was once an elegant system into an interstellar scale. No sir, it makes concessions to the party crowd, too. Your movement on the board is regulated by the shaking of your "mothership" (the aforementioned Flash Gordon spaceship), as stated earlier. The sound produced by the shaking bears a disturbing resemblance to the sound of a baby's rattle, and then the pretty-colored balls plop out the bottom. It's almost enough to make you want to teethe. If either ball is black (which will occur, statistically, 50% of the time), we have (sigh, yet another) "event". The resolution of an event feels like Regis Philbin conducting a civics oral exam. ("People are going to die unless you help. What do you do? ...Is that your final answer?") One of the problems with the events is that while you may memorize them, it won't do any good, because there are several with the same question, but different answers - which simply reduces the procedure to something of a random event, albeit a time-consuming one. So, during approximately half of the turns, the entire play sequence comes to a screeching halt, while a player is subjected to a capricious inquisition. While this sort of thing is expected in parlor games, it feels completely out of place in a game of strategy. That it occurs roughly half of the time quickly escalates it from the realm of "inappropriate" to "annoying". The best solution would have been to include, say, a second blue ball (at the very least), thereby reducing the event frequency to 40% of the time. I must admit, I have toyed with the notion of drilling holes in my spaceships, dropping additional balls in them, and plugging the hole with some cornball gizmo that I'll call the phlogistam concentrator, or some such.
      And this one does seem a strange choice - we have a game in which players encounter alien races, and yet the question-and-answer mechanism is applied to the less suitable event cards. If we are going to pretend that the players' answers to these questions really matter, wouldn't it make more sense to question them about how they handle their encounters with aliens?
      STARFARERS can be played with either 3 or 4 players. Unfortunately, a 3-player game can be a frustrating experience. The gameboard is comprised of seven, unexplored star systems, each of which has 3 planets, and 3 "colonization points", or places where hexagons containing 2 of the 3 planets meet. These are the only locations where a colony can be placed, and it gives each colony access to 2 possible resources, much like the settlements in the original SETTLERS straddled hexes. In a 3-player game, only 2 of

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