Catan Cities Knights Expansion

Anyone who has played the original game will love this expansion. It involves more depth to the original as you have to develop your knights in order to succeed. Playing time varies with the amount of people. Very fun with 5 or 6 with the expansion. I would recommend this game to anyone that loves the original or that likes to play board games in general. P.S. The only thing I would caution is if you have any animals, the pieces tend to break. This is a personal preference, just thought I would throw that out.

While the Seafarers expansion added some new wrinkles to Settlers, the game still felt like 90% of the original. Cities and Knights, however, transforms Settlers into a much more complex, longer, sophisticated game. Our group usually finishes a game of Settlers or Seafarers in about 1 hour with lots of talking, laughing, and hooting. But our first game of Cities/Knights took almost 4. I'm sure that would decrease with experience, but with so much to keep track of and plan for, we found that we weren't interacting with each other as much. Ultimately, we didn't enjoy it as much. But if you have mastered Settlers and Seafarers and want to ramp up the strategy, then this is worthwhile.

It makes the Catan game a totally different game. More complicated and more interesting. The only problem would be that it makes the game time much longer than the original pack, and the rules are much harder to understand. Suitable for senior players of Catan.

I got this expansion along with the original game and played it after playing a couple games with the original rules. The basic changes to the original game include: 1) Instead of the development deck, you now have three progress decks (sciences, trade, and politics) which offer a broader selection of usable cards than the development deck and it's 90% knights and 10% events/actions. These decks correspond to three possible areas of improvement (see next item) and have some interesting effects (everything from allowing you to take cards from another player to pulling resources for free). 2) Cities can now be improved. You get a set of flip cards that you flip as you purchase city improvements. There are two benefits to city improvements: a) when you achieve the 3rd level of improvements you gain some bonus like the ability to trade 2:1 on any resource, and b) each improvement increases the changes you'll get to pull from one of the three progress decks. 3) The addition of an e... Read more

This is a wonderful, highly addictive family board game. We got the original Settlers for Christmas and loved it so in January we saw this at the toy store and thought we would try it. Well, 3 months later my wife and 10 year old daughter and I are still playing it almost every night. It is a little more challening than "Settlers" and has even more variations and strategy so I would not recommend it for children less than 10. You have to have the original "Settlers of Catan to play. It takes about 20 minutes to learn to play and games typically take 1 to 2 hours. There are all sorts of different strategies to use and because the board varies each time you play no two games are the same. There is some cutthroat potential in the game so if your family is prone to violence you might try something else. On the other hand if you are looking for a fun, challenging game that will get your children and spouse off the computer and television to spend some time together this is highly re... Read more