Settlers of Central Asia
When in Rome…
I mean when in Central Asia playing with Mongols, you play by Mongolian rules!
You only start off with one settlement. The last player gets to place two roads.
ABSOLUTELY No Trading!
This means you just have to hoard your resources until you get four resources of a kind to convert into a different resource type. However…
Rolling a “7” doesn’t trigger the “barbarian”. The barbarian doesn’t move until someone builds a second settlement [Makes sense - why raid a village when they ain’t got nothing?]
The second settlement cannot be built on a port [Also makes sense. The Mongols were land-locked.]
After a second settlement is built, when a “7” is rolled the “barbarian” can move onto a tile and the “barbarian” gets to ask the opposing players there what they have, then randomly chooses a card from a player’s hand. The barbarian can leave the token on that tile or return it to the desert. [Also makes sense. Barbarians at the door step yell “Hey! What you got?” And if it’s appealing, he randomly takes something from the village, and can either live himself in the village as a cock blocker of sorts and reigning lord or return to the vast steppe whence he came].
Essentially, the placement of your first settlement is very key to the path and outcome of the game.
I didn’t know these rules at the start of the game, and they only revealed the Mongolian variations to me with each occurrence. So I pretty much was stuck right from the get go (I'm blue in the pic). Overall, the game actually finished faster than a traditional Settlers game, since players had more time to hoard resources, and the culling that comes with the “7” did not appear for quite some time.
Also, makes sense historically. Settlements needed a lot of time to grow and get fat since it took time to acquire resources manually, and trading was non-existent due to a lack of road network. Then, two or three settlements appeared and then that quickly turned into two or three cities for a single player. Usually, only one player could dominate the terrain like that and churn successively. Other players would be left milling their one resource type. So all the sudden when the Mongols (7) showed up and noticed the fat bounty of the land and began their raids, players with cities, even though they had lost a lot of resources, they had the facilities in place where they could quickly continue collecting again and thrive. Meanwhile, players with few settlements, even though they lost less resources than the big players, were more devastated because the few resources they lost were more crucial, and since they didn’t have the infrastructure set up, they were never able to recover and grow successful enough to create any cities, and thus they stayed as forever small settlements.
Those Mongols! That’s not how I play! And now you know how the Mongols beat the Europeans on the battlefield - because they did not play by the same rules!