I've not played Settlers for ages and I was keen to see what this new version was like so three of us gave it a go. It's not that different but has a fixed board and instead of upgrading towns to cities, you can build monuments, which give you one VP and a bonus of things like extra resource cards or a free road.

It seemed that early in the game it was tricky to expand quickly, although that may have been due to our dice rolls. Guy especially didn't seem to be able to expand very far. He was more interested in building his army. Mark G took the longest road for the first three quarters of the game but allowed me to steal it off him - helped by the road building development card I had picked up. Eventually, I managed to build a town, monument and reveal a VP development card on the same turn to claim the win.

I quite liked this version but the fixed board means there is a bit of a limit on replay value. Guy also didn't like the board layout, as it seemed to hamper the ability to expand, so early in the game we were just collecting resources with builds only occurring every two to three rounds. However, as I still really like the basis of the Settlers series, it scored pretty well for me.