In the beginning, Klaus Teuber created Settlers of Catan. Doug Gray saw that it was good, and brought it to the Promised Land. The usual preliminary shuffling of terrain hexagons to form the board has been replaced by a fixed setup, albeit with some settlement sites next to potentially productive terrain. Bonus cards in the original Settlers are lost by their owners only when a competitor overtakes them. Their equivalents here are lost even if you merely tie their owners, and remain uncontrolled until someone leads again. Therefore bonus cards tend to change hands more frequently. You can now spend resources to build a stone in Jerusalem, if you have either a settlement on (or one connected by road to) its frontier. Having the most stones of your color earns you a bonus card, and play ends when Jerusalem is completed. Highest score wins--otherwise, the champ is the player who first reaches 12 Victory Points. We recommend this game to avid Settlers fans as well as to the unconverted.

I liked it. I accept some of the complaints below, but it's a good variant of a great game system. I see the Skill/Luck ratio as the same as the original. This variant certainly adds color and a few new tactics.

This may bring the Settlers games to Christian Stores, which have become a fairly large market recently. Maybe this is how we 'convert' the American public to German boardgames!

A good game!

This is a commodity trading game based on the popular 'Settlers of Catan' series of games. You don't need to own 'Catan' for this game, because it's not just another historical scenario add-on. The play of the game is similar to 'Catan', except for the development cards. Of course that is the advantage of this game. This game was playtested by the author of 'Catan' so you can be sure it's worth the money. So open up the box with friends and family and in no time at all Jerusalem will rise stone by stone.

Do not be turned off by the religious theme, Settlers of Canaan is a very good game. The Settlers mechanics are kept intact and new concepts are introduced which add to the original game, not detract from it. You can add a brick to the temple by spending a brick and ore, the largest army card is replaced by the most priests card, and there are new, creative development cards, among other things.

After reading the previous reviews I was prompted to write my own. On one hand, my complaint wasn't addressed, on the other, I think all the complaints (mine included) are minor. Yes, the cards are lighter weight than in 'Settlers of Catan', and yes the 'bricks' are too big to fit into the spaces given, and perhaps there are too many red numbers on hills. I don't have a big problem with these things, my problem is with the number distribution. In the original there were 2 of each number except 2 and 12 of which there was 1 each, numbers were easy to keep track of. In Settlers of Canaan there are, for example, one 2, four 3s, three 4s, five 5s, etc. You must scour the board at least once each roll to make sure you didn't miss one.

Taken together all these minor faults do require me to give the game less than 5 stars, but I hate to. Settlers of Canaan is every bit as good as the original.