these points per system can be colonized. That's bad enough, but when you throw in the fact that 5 of the planet chits are ice planets and space pirates (neither of which you can initially colonize), it can render entire systems unusable. The rules do provide a method for getting rid of pirates (upgrading your mothership with enough cannons) and converting ice planets (upgrading your mothership with enough cargo rings), but from what I've seen so far, the game will often be decided before anyone does much to pursue these solutions.
      The victory point system seems skewed, too. While it will take nine resource cards to build a spaceport (four for the colony, and five for the spaceport augmentation), it only takes four resource cards to build a trade ship. The spaceport and its colony will get you two victory points. The first trade ship to visit one of the four, friendly alien races will get you the alien friendship token, which will also get you two victory points - not to mention a card providing you with some type of play bonus for the remainder of the game. While there are still alien races to visit, the decision is simple, and the points are pretty easy to get. "Fame Rings" are the true wild card in the game - they are awarded for providing the right answer on the majority of event cards. As answering these event questions is about as intellectually challenging as taking out the garbage, victory points (1 for every 2 Fame Rings) are being regularly handed out for little more than having a pulse. While this may be a desirable methodology for a pre-school, self-esteem-building exercise ("You did great, honey! Have a ribbon! Next time, though, you might want to try to run in the same direction as the children you're racing against! But you were just wonderful!"), I prefer the more old-fashioned approach of requiring players to actually earn their victory points. Call me nostalgic, I guess.
      I would also have to conclude that making all the players start at the same end of the board isn't such a hot idea. Not only does it make a game of interstellar colonization eerily resemble the Oklahoma land rush of 1889, it forces the outcome of the game to have an even greater reliance on the randomness of those silly rocket balls, and the occasional (but equally random) event card providing a "spacejump" to anywhere on the board.
      I may never know the circumstances and events surrounding the design and development of this game, but I can imagine a scenario in which the respected Mr. Teuber is testing a less-frazzled game design, and regularly getting interrupted by calls from his publishers, asking when the design will be ready, and being told that "we've really got to move on this, because we don't know how long SETTLERS will stay a hot item". We also know how the smell of money draws marketers out of their offices, forcing them to swim mindlessly toward its source, and providing any "assistance" they can - such as a touch of TRIVIAL PURSUIT here, and a touch of PACHISI there. Maybe there's an element of truth to this, and maybe Mr. Teuber just had a parlor game he had to get out of his system. One thing is fairly certain, though. Some people in the industry will invariably derive the wrong lesson. Like the grunting primitive pointing at the bat bones thrown on the hide, and blaming Grog's gangrene on a furious frog god, certain "experts" will point to this game and unequivocally state "See there? This is what happens when you spend too much money on a board game." And, in a sense, perhaps they'll be right (for all the wrong reasons), because when a lot of money gets sunk into what is originally a labor of love, love often has a way of getting lost in the fluttering of Armani suits, the banging of Gucci briefcases, and the six-tone rendition of Dixie that identifies cell phone-fed micro-management.
      To balance things out somewhat, STARFARERS OF CATAN is certainly a playable game. In fact, I can even recommend it, if you're looking for something of a common denominator between the strategy arena and the luck arena (like the original SETTLERS, but with more emphasis on the luck factor). For the rest of us, though, it's a pretty safe bet that Klaus Teuber will design far better games in the future - games probably more deserving of the large budget, yet forced to reveal their elegance and compelling mechanisms through a more modest array of components. I look forward to them.

CAROLUS MAGNUS
a review by Darrell Hanning

"I cannot believe that God would choose to play dice with the universe." - Albert Einstein

     The dichotomy seems to be an almost inextricable function of our intellectual workings. The subconscious predisposition toward binary categorization can be seen to serve as a quick-judgement tool often useful in a crisis. (Fight the sabertooth, or vamoose?) Unfortunately, it is used far too often, and often inappropriately. We use it like a club, pounding away any disturbing implications of the world around us. Women are in this group, while men are in that group. Non-Christians are in this group, and Christians are in that group. Democrats

vs. Republicans, Socialists vs. Capitalists, Ford vs. Chevy, American vs. imports...the list is almost endless. It seems that only in retrospect can we realize the pitfalls of seeing everything in terms of black and white, and at that point, the water is already under the bridge, the milk is already spilt, the horses are out of the barn, and the baby is wondering just why in the hell he was thrown out with the bath water.
      When I first saw CAROLUS MAGNUS, I saw it as an elegant beauty of a game. And the temptation to establish a dichotomy in reference to it is almost irresistible. But I won't. No...wait, yes I will. Knowing full well that most (if not all) dichotomies are pure bunk, I will say that there are two kinds of board games: Those that give you rules you spend the whole game trying to grasp, and those that give you rules for which you spend the whole game trying to grasp the implications. CAROLUS MAGNUS is decidedly in the latter group. It is the uncluttered sports car, the clean lines of which belie the brute force resting beneath the hood. No later than five turns into the game, you will have a complete understanding of the rules. And then the implications push you into your seat, and you start to feel a little awe at what this baby might do at full-throttle.
      CAROLUS MAGNUS is Charlemagne, or Charles the Great, and the theme of the game is that he is visiting the various provinces of France, deciding which court faction controls them. Of course, the theme is about as pertinent to this game as the physiological means by which Mr. Ed learned to speak is pertinent to a certain TV show. It's somewhat clear from the play of the game that one is involved in some sort of real estate deal, but the details of the underlying social-political situation are utterly irrelevant. The game could just as easily be about Jesus deciding who controls which clouds (in which case it would, no doubt, be named Messiah Magnus). Or, it could be about Tom Selleck deciding which of his P.I. buddies is going to stake out which bad guy hangout. (In which case, of course, it would be...(shudder)...Magnum Magnus). But before I intrigue some Hollywood pinhead, let's get serious about this game.
      When you dump out CAROLUS MAGNUS, you're ready to play. Well, almost. It's about as close to that as you'll ever get in a game more involved than JACKS or PICK-UP STICKS. There are umpty-doodle wooden cubes in five colors - red, green, blue, yellow, and purple. How many cubes are there exactly? (West Palm Beach residents may never know exactly how many, even if they were to agree on what colors are present, and how many colors each cube has.) It doesn't matter, and if you do happen to run short, grab some out of your copy of some other Euro-style game. (Offhand, it seems to me that if you run out, you're playing the game way too defensively.) The pile of cubes goes in the middle of the table, like multi-colored landfill. Around this pile you place 15 "land" tiles in a circle. The tiles are variations on collections of hexagons, much like the Rubik's Cube pieces are variations on collections of cubes. Picking 3 cubes of each color, you randomly place one cube on each land tile. The Charles token is then placed on any land tile. Each player takes a "court", which is a smallish board with positions for marking control of each of the five colors. The players take turns rolling the color dice (red, blue, green, yellow, and purple on five of the sides, and a "wild card" on the sixth side) for a total of seven rolls, and collects cubes matching their results. When a "wild card" is rolled, the player can take one cube of any color he wishes. The game is now afoot.
      Each player also has 5 cardboard tokens, with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 on them. At the beginning of each new game turn, the players openly select one of their tokens they have yet to use (the first player in the previous round picking first). The tokens are then compared, and player turn order goes from lowest number to highest number. Ties go in the same order the respective players went in the previous round. A used token cannot be re-used until all five have been used. Token selection is crucial, once the game is well underway.
      On a player's turn, he first chooses what to do with 3 of his 7 cubes. A player may play some or all of the 3 in his "court", in an effort to either gain control of one or more colors (by having more cubes of that color in his court than anyone else has in their court), add to his advantage in one or more colors in his court, or try to catch up to someone else who has a large advantage in one or more colors. A player can also place some or all of his 3 cubes on the land tiles, in an effort to make control of those tiles more difficult for the opponent (or easier for himself).
      The player then moves Charles clockwise around the board, a number of land tiles up to but not exceeding the value of the turn order token he played. Where Charles ends his move, he judges. How he judges is by comparing who has control of the color of the cube - or cubes - present on that land tile. That is, if you control the color red, I control the color blue, and there are three red cubes and two blue cubes on the tile, then you gain control of the tile. If it is a tie, then nothing happens. If a player does have control, then that land tile is awarded to the controlling player, and this is indicated by placing one of the player's pawns on that land tile. The pawn not only indicates ownership, it also counts as one point in favor of the controlling player, if Charles subsequently lands on that tile again. In addition to this, if control is

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