Settlers of Catan expansion Crop Trust, reviewed.

Settlers of Catan is a game about growth. Harvest the island's natural resources to build roads, cities, and universities It's kind of like an econ 101 textbook. It's about as true to real world growth as the board is to the real image of Catan. That's where the crop trust expansion comes in.

It gives players just a little taste of the consequences of unchecked resource extraction. Just like Catan, you roll dice, harvest resources, and build things with those resources. The Crop Trust expansion changes this, the food tile. Instead of just food, the fields now grow some pretty classic Catan style crops.

You have beans, rice, quinoa, maize, and wheat. When it's time to harvest, you remove one of these tokens. Here's the catch: harvest all the food and that tile will never produce food again. And you can't settle Catan if you can't eat. Like seriously if enough fields are empty everyone starves, and the game is over.

Instead, you can choose to not harvest, or you can store seeds for later. So it creates this really interesting dynamic where you still want to win, but you have to balance competition with cooperation, in order to avoid ecological collapse. The game also introduces hazards: every settlement or city you build comes with a random natural hazard.

The trick is to plan your fields and store enough seeds to be able to withstand these hazards. Because again, if enough plants go extinct, it's game over. Despite all these grim elements, I swear it's actually a fun game. And you can still win the normal way! Get 10 victory points without destroying the island and you win! This expansion is a partnership between Catan and the Crop Trust, the group that runs the Svalbard seed vault, a giant underground archive of seeds in the Arctic.

And it's kind of cool because these scenarios are based on real events in history. Like this, the monoculture token: if you have a field without crop diversity all the crops on that field die. It was based off of a real global banana crop that was wiped out by an invasive fungus.

I'd say Crop Trust strikes a pretty good balance: It adds a fun new element of Catan, but it's not quite as convoluted as they found some of the other expansions to be. And it introduces the environment as a real challenge, not just some gloomy statement.