It was 2019 when I first saw the promotion for a new online Catan game called Catan: World Explorers (CWE).
CWE was to be an Augmented Reality game where players joined teams and you raced around with your phone to track down resources allowing your team to build and earn victory points (read more on the game here). The app was made available to play in New Zealand from June 2020. In fact New Zealand was the only country in the world where it could be played at first. However later in the same year it was also made available in Australia, Denmark, Singapore and Switzerland.
I joined early on, played and, I have to admit, got bored very quickly.
Presumably I was not alone in this reaction because before even fully launching, the app and servers were shut down in 2021. One of the developers was quoted as saying “We got a little too complicated and a little too far from the original Catan game,” ... and I can only agree with them.
HOWEVER this post is not about the software, it is about the promotional items that were created for World Explorers and, in some cases, never launched.
While CWE was a failure, it is still part of the Catan family. Personally I classify it as an electronic game so for me it has less appeal than items relating to the physical board game. For this reason any promotional items that can be collected cheaply are of interest to me - I will just not spend as much on them as I would for promotional items for the "real" game.
RESOURCE CARDS
The first CWE promotional items to appear were a set of resource cards with q-codes on them representing each of the five Catan resources. These would help future players get resources within the app. My set of these resources came from Germany and I am told were given away at Spiel 2019. While not very common, these cards are not rare and have appeared a number of times on sites like eBay. They are an interesting and relatively cheap collectible and I am happy to have them in my collection.
FENNI'S SHEARING SEASON
The second promotional item I have seen is a printed scenario called Fenni's Shearing Season (read more at BGG). Dated 2021, the unusual aspect to this scenario is that the first online reference I have found is dated after it was announced CWE was shutting down. This scenario was for use in the board game and presumably was created to encourage existing Catan players to try the app. The play of the scenario is not unique, it is simply a modified version of the existing Santa/Easter Bunny scenario.
While this new scenario has now been found in a few countries, it remains very scarce. Certainly I have been unable to find one for my own collection. As the items is branded by Catan and Asmodee, I have added the scenario to my ludography of English products. I feel that with this set being produced, but never officially released, the scenario may well be something very collectible in the future. While the scenario was intended as a free giveaway, I think they will gain value.
My reason for this is I think this scenario is similar to rare giveaways like the English Hawaii map. Free to get originally but now selling for up to 90 Euros in places. However this price can easily be affected by availability in the future. As the Hawaii map is now launching as a standard product the rare map value is likely to fall - just as a discovery of a large number of the already printed Shearing scenario's (they must be somewhere!) could drive the current high price down very quickly.
WORLD EXPLORER'S PRESS KIT
The last promotional item I have seen cropped up this week with a fellow collector in Sweden. This a very unusual promotional box of goodies. Included in the box is the scenario mentioned above as well as some figures for the team mascots within CWE (Wolf, Eagle and Bear).
While this is a promotional item it does not look like it was for the mass-market. The as yet unconfirmed theory is this was a very limited edition press launch kit at a game expo. If so it is very unlikely many have survived and it would be something that will remain rare and very collectible.
Personally, I would happily add this to my collection as a novelty item, but it does not warrant high enough to join my list of must have items. It is a press kit for an app, and worse an app that I did not really enjoy.
THE FUTURE
Do I think World Explorer items have a value now? Yes but I am not sure at what level.
Do I think they could be worth even more in the future? Quite probably given the unusual history of the app and how far CWE was developed and promoted before being withdrawn,
I think it has already become a valid, if not odd, piece of Catan history. While there appears to be no mention of the app or scenario any longer on the official Catan website, I am happy to have the scenario and resource cards in my own Catan ludography.
Of these three items, the Explorers box is most interesting. To the right person it will be worth the price it is being offered at? I think the price can be justified by collectors of rare Catan. My comparison to justify this thought would be to look at the old 2000 game The Communication in Catan. This was a giveaway item at a show and it was reported that most promotional copies were later destroyed after the event as they were no longer needed. Over the past few years the rare copies of this game that have appeared for sale have crept up and up.
For my Communication play set I paid 275 euros, and for my collection copy, a sealed set signed by Klaus Teuber, I paid 760 euros. Only a few years later I have seen these sets advertised at 1200 euros and sell for in excess of 1,000 euros.
So while this pack has potential, the test will be to see how many of these packs surface in the next few years. Indications are they were made in very limited numbers for a single promotional event. If this is the case then the price of this auction, with all the additional bonus items, represents really good value.
Sadly it is just out of the range of a semi-retired collector like myself.
EBAY AUCTION - MARCH 2023
I refer to a World Explorers Box being currently available. Here is a link to the auction, although this will expire at some stage. Below is the photo of the items that are/were for sale.
All photos are sourced from SettlersOfCrypto