How to play Catan: Seafarers

Catan: Seafarers is an expansion by Klaus Teuber that requires the Catan base game to play. It adds sea hexes, ships, gold fields, and the pirate, plus a booklet of island-hopping scenarios — each with its own map, special rules, and victory-point rewards. Rather than competing on a single island, players now race to extend sea routes outward and plant the first settlements on new land.

The roll-trade-build rhythm of base Catan remains intact, but Seafarers layers on meaningful new decisions: when to pivot from roads to ships, which unexplored island to race toward, and whether to move the pirate or the robber when a 7 lands. Founding a distant settlement at the right moment can leapfrog your point total in ways the base game alone rarely allows.

First Catan expansion? Don't expect a new game to learn — Seafarers changes nothing about how you roll, trade, or build. It's really a book of ready-made maps plus the pieces to play them: each scenario diagram tells you exactly how to lay out the board, what's special this time, and what winning takes. Master the handful of ship rules below and every scenario in the box is open to you, roughly in rising order of complexity.

What's in the box, and what each piece does at the table. Everything here supplements the Catan base game — you need a complete base copy to play:

• 6 frame pieces — combine with the base game's frame (flipped to its all-sea side) to enclose the larger seascapes the scenarios call for.
• 19 sea hexes — open water: they separate the islands and are where shipping routes live. Nothing produces on them, but crossing them is the whole point of the expansion.
• 11 terrain hexes (2 gold fields, 2 deserts, 2 hills, 2 mountains, 1 fields, 1 forest, 1 pasture) — the raw material for new islands, added to the base game's hexes to build each scenario's map. The gold fields are the stars: they pay any resource you choose.
• 60 wooden ships (15 per color) — roads for the sea. Each marks a leg of a shipping route between two intersections; unlike roads, a ship at the open end of a route can later be picked up and moved.
• 1 pirate ship (black) — the robber's seaborne twin. Parked on a sea hex, it robs adjacent ship owners and freezes ship building and movement around that hex.
• 50 Catan chits — scenario currency: most often laid under a settlement as special victory points for feats like founding the first settlement on a new island, so everyone can see how you got your score.
• 10 number tokens — extra production numbers for the scenario islands, on top of the base game's 18.
• 10 harbor tokens — Seafarers' own harbors, shuffled face down and placed at random on the spots each scenario marks. They fully replace the base game's smaller harbor pieces, which stay in the box.
• 1 Game Rules & Scenarios booklet — the ship, gold, and pirate rules plus a campaign of scenarios (with a final open-ended one for designing your own maps).

Seafarers follows the standard Catan turn sequence — roll, trade, build — with the following additions.

1. Build ships. A ship costs 1 lumber + 1 wool and goes on an edge between two sea hexes, or between a sea hex and a land hex (a coastal edge) — never between two land hexes. Any edge holds one ship or one road, never both. Each new ship must touch your coastal settlement/city or continue one of your existing ships, branching as freely as roads do.
2. Ships and roads don't touch. A chain of your ships is a shipping route, and it only connects to your road network at an intersection where you have built a settlement or city. Even if roads and ships meet at the same corner, they stay separate networks until a settlement joins them.
3. Move one ship per turn. During your build phase you may relocate one ship of an open route — the ship at the far end, away from its home settlement — to any legal edge, as long as you didn't build it this turn. Ships in a closed route (one linking two of your settlements or cities) are locked. This is the expansion's signature move: your fleet can change its mind.
4. Settle across the sea. When a route reaches a new coastline you may found a settlement there (normal cost, normal distance rule) and use it as a base for further roads and ships. Most scenarios pay special victory point chits for feats like the first settlement on a new island — slide the chit under that settlement so the table can count it. In scenarios with unexplored map, reaching face-down hexes flips them, and discovering land brings a small reward.
5. Gold fields. When a gold field's number is rolled, each adjacent settlement collects any 1 resource of its owner's choice, and each city any 2. Gold is the most flexible income on the map — and everyone knows it, so expect the robber.
6. The pirate. On a 7 — or when playing a Knight — you choose: move the robber to a land hex or the pirate to a sea hex. The pirate steals 1 random card from one player with a ship on that hex's border, and while it sits there no one may build new ships on that hex's edges or move ships away from them.
7. Longest Trade Route. Longest Road is renamed and upgraded: the 2 VP special card now counts your longest unbroken line of roads and/or ships (joined only through settlements, per rule 2). Five segments claim it; a longer rival line steals it.
8. Road Building, at sea. The base game's Road Building card now offers 2 roads, 2 ships, or 1 of each.

A turn in practice. Ana rolls a 4, and her settlement beside the 4-gold-fields takes any resource she likes — she picks ore. She then pays 1 lumber + 1 wool for a ship, closing the gap to a small island — founding a settlement on that coast is next turn's dream. Beto, on his turn, rolls a 7, moves the pirate onto the sea hex bordering Carla's route, steals a random card from her, and freezes the end ship she meant to swing north. Carla shrugs and plays Road Building for 1 road + 1 ship, rebuilding momentum on the cheap. Diego quietly counts his roads-plus-ships chain: seven long, one settlement short of connecting — and of stealing Longest Trade Route from Ana.

Each scenario sets its own victory-point target — nearly all sit above base Catan's 10, usually 12 to 14 — and two of them replace the target with a goal of their own (capturing your pirate fortress, finishing a Wonder), so check the scenario page before you start. Points come from settlements, cities, Longest Trade Route (which replaces Longest Road and counts ships), Largest Army, victory-point development cards, and the scenario's special victory point chits, which sit visibly under the settlements that earned them.

Strategically, identify which new islands offer the richest bonuses early and commit your ship line toward them before a rival cuts you off. Longest Trade Route counts both roads and ships, so a long sea route can be doubly valuable — but remember it only links through settlements, so plan the junction, not just the line. And watch the pirate: parked on your shipping lane it can bottleneck your expansion and drain your hand, so keep Knight cards in reserve to push it away.