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Starfarers of Catan
Price: $60.00
Publisher: Mayfair Games www.mayfairgames.com
 This has been out for a while now, and I just now got the chance to play it. I wish I hadn't waited so long.
The first thing you notice about Starfarers of Catan is the high-quality components. And unlike the components in a lot of boardgames, which are a lot of flash with little substance, a condition which led to the founding of Cheapass Games, the components in Starfarers of Catan actually serve a purpose, showing the types of ships one has in play, displaying the technical sophistication of one's ships, and even adjudicating the unique movement system of the game (more on that later).
The game is a carefully balanced combination of exploration, building, strategy, trading, and luck. One interesting fact is that it looks like the game was designed to make it difficult to discover an optimal strategy. For example, how far one can move is determined by two colored balls that come out of the "mother ship" component. Since the balls are hidden in the plastic ship, there's no way of figuring out the probabilities, except empirically (or by taking the thing apart), which must frustrate min-maxers to no end. It's not easy to plan for the "average" move, and it's genuinely difficult to tell who is likely to win a race to a particular spot on the board, to make contact with a particular alien race, for example. (Every time you establish trading with an alien race, you get a unique ability connected to that race.)
The most interesting random element of the game is in the form of encounters: If you roll a black ball on your mother ship, the player to your left draws a card from the encounter deck and reads it to you. Depending on a combination of luck and the choices you make ("How many resources do you give to the merchant?") the card can have good, bad, or indifferent effects. What's especially intersting is some cards sound the same when first read, but have wildly different effects depending on what you do -- giving the merchant two resources isn't always good, and there's no way to tell what card got drawn.
The second most interesting random element is in the form of exploration: There are many planets to explore, which may contain a rich mother lode of potential resources, or there may be pirates to remove or an ice planet to terraform.
But it's certainly not all luck. Like Settlers of Catan, one starts out next to certain areas which produce certain resources when a particular number is rolled on two six-sided dice, and figuring out what one can build, plus what one can afford to trade to other players, not to mention what alien races to make contact with (what alien-granted powers are most useful often depend on one's ability to build certain improvements and on what resources one has access to), are an important part of the game. While trading is not as all-imporant as it is in Settlers, it's still a major part of the game.
The random and strategic elements balance nicely, making a difficult but fun game. And unlike Settlers of Catan, you aren't totally out in the cold once you start losing: So long as you have a low number of victory points, you recieve a random resource from Earth every turn, giving those who are lagging behind a real chance to turn their fortunes around without unbalancing the game.
Fans of the Settlers of Catan, of space exploration games, and of good strategy games will love this game. It's simple to learn and play (tho not as simple as Settlers), and it has excellent replay value. And unlike many other games, the components are not only beautiful, but functional, though they're not a sturdy as I'd like. Regardless, it's more than worth the money, and plus you can always use some of those bits to play Cheapass games...
Late Addendum: I've played this game a few more times since I wrote this review, and while my comments still stand, I will note that the game components are even more fragile than I implied above. Be careful while adding boosters to your mother ship. This doesn't stop one from playing the game -- nothing broke catastrophically -- but I wanted to mention this as a possible negative to the game. We still had a blast playing it, though.
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