Settlers of SHL is an interesting take on a resource gathering game and a luck based game. You start off as the GM of two teams, a juniors and a majors. These become important later on. The board upon opening is the layout of North America. The goal of the game is to farm the best players and increase your reputation as a team in order to get to the coveted challengers cup first and take victory. To do this you have to encircle certain states that have different resource production. These resources are the different stats for all of the players but limited to: Defense, Scoring, Passing, Checking, and Skating. Each of these stats can be used to recruit players from a vast pool of players who can then be sold back to the pool for money in order to build and develop new outreach tools. You have to manage your players effectively though because at the same time as managing these sellable contracts, you have to create a team of 5 players that will determine your on ice strength. When a person has successfully recruit 5 players then they may announce to the other players that they will be “making a run” at the Challenge Cup and this will signal that all other players have one last turn to make any last ditch attempts to buy, sell, and bolster their teams for the final competition. After every player has taken their final turn, total power of each player is counted to determine “seeds.”
What follows is each player rolls an amount of dice equal to their total power. On each player card next to their strength are faces of a die which indicate on what rolls that player scores a point. If a roll is matched on one of your defensive players then you can block that many shots from your opponent. This continues until 6 rounds are completed. Whoever scores the most goals in the matchup wins. Of course there is a lot of praying to Simon in this game as even the top seeded team can be defeated by a cohort of juniors.