There are sixty-six items on the official Catan board game shop, which gives you a good idea of how much mileage there is in Catan – Console Edition expansions. You can bet your bottom meeple that The Helpers won’t be the last of them.
Catan – Console Edition: The Helpers DLC is priced up at £6.99, or comes as part of the Season Pass at £24.99 (we’re doing passes for board games now). The DLC gets you an entire new mechanic – the titular Helpers – and twelve Helper cards for you to pick between.
You can see why Dovetail Games chose The Helpers as their first foray into bolt-ons for the base game. They’re not a completely different board or core set, which might splinter the current player base. They don’t bring wholesale changes to the rules either, which people have only just started to learn. What they represent is an extra layer on the existing game and a strategic choice to make.
On setup, each player is randomly given a Helper card. Should you want to use it on your turn, that card tends to be played in the Build and Trade phase. There are a couple that trigger on dice rolls on other player’s turns, but mostly these are ring-fenced to your own.
The effects are cleverly designed to patch over some of the faults in the basic Catan design. Got a player who is running away with victory? Then you might want Ryan, who picks on the player with the highest current Victory Points and pilfers a resource from them. Being picked on yourself? Then perhaps sir would like Digur, who can protect from an aggressively placed Robber.
The same goes for certain play styles. I’ve always found that it’s impossible to solely hunt for Development Cards: you tend to need to mix it up with another strategy. With The Helpers DLC, I’m not so convinced anymore. Diara is a killer card who allows you to purchase Development Cards with a broader range or resources AND lets you choose from three choices when picking. Suddenly building an army or hoarding Victory Points doesn’t seem as unlikely.
The effects are all ported from Asmodee’s own The Helpers expansion for the board game, and they’re as well thought out as you’d expect from the creators of the game. I’ve got quibbles – there doesn’t seem to be a way of discarding them, so it’s easy to get lumbered with a card you can’t get rid of (I’ve spent the whole game with the highest Victory Points, so Ryan was bloody hard to shed). And there are a couple of cards which, at least in our view, don’t have as much utility. Hogni, who shifts one of your road pieces about, soon becomes a bit of a chocolate teapot.
Once you’ve used your Helper, you’ve got a decision to make. Do you flip it, keeping it for one more use? Or do you replace it with a different helper in the deck? This choice is made all the juicier by there being only one of each Helper, shared between all players. Jealously holding onto a Helper who would help others is a good tactic, while ditching your card to pick up a killer one that has recently been discarded is also viable. You’ll soon start recognising the Helpers who kick Catan ass, picking them up whenever they hit the pile. Kaja, we’re looking at you.
There are hiccups which could really have done with being sorted out. But Catan: Console Edition is young, and various improvements may be made in the future. The first is that using the Helpers takes an inordinately long period of time. We’re not sure why, on drawing one, we need to see an unskippable version of it, hanging on our screen for a good few seconds. This happens to everyone, so the time adds up.
Equally, each player is now thinking about the Helper they are using and then choosing from twelve in their turn. Catan was already plagued with issues around turn length, particularly in multiplayer, so adding another choice – and one filled with analysis paralysis – is making the problem even sharper. Turn lengths may need another look from Dovetail.
More inexplicable is the inability to play a Quick Game with Helpers added. You have to hop through various customisation menus if you want to play a Helpers-bolstered game, which seems like a glaring omission. It’s also a shame – although possibly unavoidable – that you have to enter a Helpers-specific lobby to play multiplayer. You can only play with other players who have Helpers unlocked, and those players must also have manually selected to include Helpers. The results are about what you might expect: we only got one game of Helpers online. Praise be for the fantastic matchmaking system that allows you to play locally while searching for online matches, but it didn’t help with the general paucity of games. We played far more games locally.
There’s that price, too, which we’re still mulling over. £6.99 for twelve cards isn’t fantastic value, at least on the face of it. There are no new card backs, game modes or dice decals. The cards even reuse the character art, which can be confusing as a player uses a Helper that looks like you. The counterpoint to this criticism is that they’re a fine addition that does a lot with a little: whole new play styles are opened up, and some of the more minor frustrations in the game are alleviated by some well designed cards. So, we’re on the fence, which – in Catan terms – is the best place to be. You get the benefit of both sides and their dice rolls.
Catan – Console Edition: The Helpers ends up being a safe but welcome first expansion to the base board game. It’s a touch on the expensive side at about 50p a card, and it would benefit from usability improvements to turn-length and Quick Games, but Catan fans (Cafans?) will find they get a lot of enjoyment from trading for this one.
