How does someone turn Settlers of Catan, the legendary German board game, into Star Trek? It’s very easy. Just change some names, have planets instead of natural resources tiles, and presto, Star Trek Catan, the game where the roads are paved with starships.
Literally. Hundreds of little plastic USS Enterprises that replace the road pieces in Settlers of Catan, creating highways of spaceships. In a strange way, it makes sense. Where roads connect towns and resources on a planet, starships that ply the space lanes fill the same role in connecting multiple planets.
Star Trek Catan has many planet tiles that are functionally the same as the resource tiles that make up Settlers. Instead of brick and wool resources, you have tritanium, dilithium, oxygen, water and food planets. Towns and cities are now outposts and starbases. And the robber? It’s now a Klingon battlecruiser that denies resources and steals resource cards from a player’s hand. One wonders whether Mr. Worf might use his bat’leth sword at seeing his Empire represented as thieves.
While the Trek theme is superficial, it is represented in the game through character cards, all from Original Trek, including Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Mr. Scott, Uhura, Sulu, Chekov, Nurse Chapel, Yeoman Rand and Sarek. Each character provides special bonuses, such as Kirk protecting the player from the effects of the robber, or Spock providing an automatic resource card when a player fails to get any resources on a regular dice roll. There is no particular connection between a character’s Star Trek role and his special abilities, but it’s an interesting touch, especially because every player starts with a character card that they can use twice before having to trade it in for another character of their choice. This tends to circulate the characters around the table.
In the end, the question most players will ask is not whether Star Trek Catan is sufficiently Trek-ish, but whether it’s fun. The answer is yes. Our group, all of whom had played so much Catan that they had become somewhat jaded, really enjoyed the Star Trek version. The Trek character cards added a fresh touch, and the rows of starships looping around the map is visually striking. Catan fans will enjoy the new character cards, and Trek fans who are interested in learning about Catan will find this a good place to start.
He wore jeans and a ballcap with a green shamrock on it, and if it weren’t for his gun and bullet-proof vest, you might not even know he was a cop. But he’s heading up a special team of Cook County Sheriff’s officers whose job it is to go out a couple of times a week just to seize FOID cards from people who have had them revoked.
If this seems like overkill - three guys with guns and Kevlar going to get a plastic identification card - Imhof says there’s a reason for the precautions.
In Illinois, somebody trying to buy a gun with a revoked card at a local gun shop - where a background check is required - would likely get caught. But Imhof says there’s still a lot you can get away with in Illinois without somebody checking whether a FOID is actually valid.
“They can get ammunition and they can also get the weapons on a private deal if somebody doesn’t check to see if, uh, he’s revoked. So, I mean it’s important to grab ‘em,” he said.
So Imhof and his team are going door to door in the suburbs, trying to track down the nearly 3,000 revoked FOID cards that are still floating around Cook County - and, more importantly – to ask people to hand over their guns.
One of Imhof’s partners squawks him over the radio to say that the man at the first stop is recorded as having bought a shotgun within the state of Illinois.
“There’s still a potential that he has a gun, he has his card,” Imhof said. “We won’t really know until we actually have contact with him.”
We roll down a tree-lined street in suburban Melrose Park, and pull up to a white house with a chainlink fence. I stay in the car while the three officers walk past a row of bushy green hostas and knock on the front door.
After a few minutes of knocking, there’s still no answer. So they leave a note telling the person with the revoked card to give them a call.
If this all seems a little polite for police work, it’s because local law enforcement in Illinois don’t actually have the legal authority to seize this person’s gun - even if they had their FOID revoked for beating their spouse or being mentally ill.Read the full story at www.smartcardfactory.com!
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