Thread: Rivals for Catan:: Variants:: Cards that never get played

by trumanhorner

My wife and I have been playing this a lot since we discovered it about 6 months ago, at least once or twice a week. It really is one of the best two player games we've ever encountered.

One thing we noticed, though, is that are a couple of cards that we almost never play, and we're trying to think of some house rules that might make those cards more appealing. I'm just curious to hear anybody's thoughts on this:

Goldsmith - I have used this a few times, but very rarely. Unless you have multiple gold fields, you're not likely to just sit on your gold and save up to get three. It might take a long time and that gold is at risk of brigands attack. Likewise, I'm not going to waste a spot in my hand with the Goldsmith while I'm saving up my gold. We were thinking about maybe making that card a 1:1 trade gold for any other resource up to a maximum of three. Similar to Traveling Merchant.

Storehouse - It's not a terrible card, but it doesn't offer much benefit. The way we tend to play, we very rarely have excess resources at the end of the turn, and there is only a 1/6 chance of brigands, and only your sheep and gold are at risk. So we're generally just not that worried about brigands. The Storehouse does get you extra resources during Year of Plenty, but you have to get that twice in order come out ahead on even having built the Storehouse in the first place. We were thinking that maybe a house rule could be that all 4 regions in the settlement/city with the Storehouse would get a resource on Year of Plenty. But that might be a bit too much benefit. We were also thinking about maybe giving the Storehouse a Commerce Point. That might be an option.

I'm just curious if anyone else has had a similar experience with these two cards and has any suggestions on how to make them better. Thanks!