I got this book for free at GenCon for playing a certain number of Mayfair games.

I thought it was well written and the depiction of Viking culture was historically accurate. ( )

I got this book for free at GenCon for playing a certain number of Mayfair games.

I thought it was well written and the depiction of Viking culture was historically accurate. ( )

Het spel was beter /
The Game was better ( )

Interessant geschriebener Historienroman. Macht Lust auf mehr. ( )

I was not expecting this to be the world's greatest testament to great fiction. I've played the game on which this books is based a couple times. That feel is what I was looking for in the book. That experience is what i expected the story to cover.

In this, the book failed miserably.

Settlers of Catan as a game begins with the civilization you play competing against other civilizations. The book takes the experience and looks the other way. A third of the book is the back story leading up to the arrival on Catan. A Dark Age culture of Vikings striking out to found a new settlement that author believes is needful to devote 180 pages too. Good advice to authors and editors is to begin the story with the action of the story. What happens in the first 180 pages could have been boiled down in flashbacks to a handful of pages.

Then Catan deals with other settlers to provide conflict. Here the conflict comes from three groups within the entire community that take years to become entities to break off. It uses our history and Christianity as one of the means to do so. Catan of course is a fantastical creation, perhaps Greenland when it was Green and not snow, but our Vikings clearly find an Island South and West of Brittany, by some 30 days or so (And too large to be a Carribean Island unless it is Cuba)

Here the Author misses a trick, for the way she set things up, she could have divorced herself from our world entirely. Or She could have stuck true to the game and had other explorers/conquerors having established colonies on the Island to be a conflict.

By making this eternal conflict over religious growth, with primitive people fully aware of concepts in our current time that require psychoanalysis of the inhabitants of the community, we are lost. These people of the story have read too many texts on how to raise children and interact with their fellow men, even part of a 12 step program to deal with their addictions I am sure to convince me that they are from the 9th century and skilled enough to have 100 adults that can found a thriving colony that can not find it's way back to Europe.

Our Author is so well read that she had those other ingredients, she should remember Pitcairn Island. Too few gene lines will result in terrible inbreeding and far too many health problems later on.

So an epic fail, with some parts that are good enough. If you like the game read it without expectations. If you like the period, Gable does some of that well enough too. But be prepared for what I pointed out. A read once, that a sequel might save, but probably won't. ( )