Announcing the Yucatan Token Set* *While Yucatan is not approved by, nor licensed by, Klaus Teuber, Catan GmbH, or Mayfair Games, Inc., it is compatible with ‘The Settlers of Catan®’ and is published under agreement with Mayfair Games, Inc., which reserves all rights therein. Are you tired of slowing your game down by having to deal out cards and organize them in your hand? Do you realize that if you play on Xbox Live that it tells you how many of each resource are out there among all the players? It gives you much better information and allows the game to play quicker! Have you ever stepped back and realized your game play is really in two very different worlds? One world with cute wooden houses and cities, great roads winding among resources, spreading out inexorably toward the ocean? And then there is the world of a card game! The cards sort of ruin the experience by many accounts. We are changing all that by allowing your resource world to come into harmony with your game world. Announcing the Yucatan Token Set! Imagine for a moment rather than collecting cards on this beautiful miniature island that you were actually gathering the resources from the island? How would that work? Simple, you use the Yucatan Token Set! Included in this set are 19 of each of 5 custom designed tokens: Sheep, Grain, Brick, Wood and Stone (Ore). You can either put them all to one side and keep them in front of you with your cities and roads as you collect them from the "bank", or better yet put them right out on the board on the tiles representing the origin of each resource! Imagine an island resplendent with sheep-filled rolling hills, wheat-filled fields, dark wooden forests, brick-laden cliffs and ore-rich quarries! Pull the resources directly from the island and open up your playing world! Dump the cards and play like real island settlers! Release date scheduled for late February or early March. FAQ 1) OK so this sounds cool but what about keeping your cards hidden?
No problem at all, you just keep one hand over your tokens, or put a small folded blind up if you thing thats tough. There are tons of games where you can keep money or victory points hidden and thats how its always done, just keep a hand over your pieces or any object in front of your tokens.
Our focus group played this way several times and its no worse than holding cards, and much much easier if you happen to be a brilliant 6 year old who is great at Catan and terrible at holding cards!
1) What about the robber, how do you have someone randomly select a resource for stealing when they can see what you have?
Dealing with the robber is no worse than the many, many games where you have to select a starting player at random (like you do for Kingsburg, Stone Age, Powergrid and others). What do you do then? Put a token of each color in someone's hand and have someone randomly choose with your hand in the air, or simply shake the tokens in 2 hands and randomly drop one out to the table. The same thing works just fine here.
If that doesn't appeal to you then you can line the pieces up from say 1-7 and have the person moving the robber simply turn around and pick a number at random. The other players can watch to ensure there is no cheating involved.
Really the tokens speed the trading and distribution of resources so much that the extra 5 seconds the robber may take is totally offset and then some. Tokens Only