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Wild barbarians, lured by Catan's wealth and power, maneuver to attack. Their massive warships loom against the orange horizon. You must be strong! Barbarians attack the weakest targets, and the victim of their onslaught will be the player who contributes the least to the defense of Catan. Don't take any chances! Field your knights!
In The Cities & Knights of Catan, you engage in the defense of Catan and compete to build the three great metropolises of Catan. Each of these magnificent centers are even more valuable than cities and are safe from the barbarians. You must invest in city improvements, which you acquire using commodities of trade: Coin, Paper, and Cloth. If you improve your culture, muster your knights, and enrich your cities, you will be the master of the great realm of Catan. This edition features all new artwork, and an insert tray to hold game components for up to 6 players.
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Technical Details
- All new 4th Edition!!- New Graphics!!
- New Card Art!!
- New Packaging & Tiles!!
- Full Color Rules Book
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By K. Melson (Stanwood, MI)
Once you master the basic game, it is time to move on.... this is great fun!
By Adam (Chicago IL)
The expansion is awesome and exciting. The new expansion completely changes the strategy of the game. The basic game has but two or three main strategies, but the cities and nights expands that to many different types. You'll find the game takes much longer to play because of the slower expansion, but the thought and strategy is so much more in-depth that it will be worth it.
By E. Wise (Ohio, USA)
My coworkers and I loved to play a rousing game of Catan over lunch breaks and we decided to pick up this expansion. As others have noted, it does add a bunch of new features and adds complexity. It's still mostly Catan, and a decently fun game. Nice for a change of pace if you have a group of regular gaming friends.
The main negative against this game is the progress cards. You get progress cards whenever the third dice rolls your progress color and the red dice matches up with your city progress advancement. You can play as many as you want each turn. This, like dev cards in the original, at the start can lead to some fun surprises that mix up the gameplay. However, when you get to mid to end game where everyone has commodities advanced, it seems to us that every turn people are throwing 1-2 progress cards and the game seems to devolve into who is lucky enough to get a stack of the best cards, draw 8+ resources, score 4 points in one turn, and win. We're considering curbing the progress cards to be one play per turn, because everyone playing multiples seems to make the game border on ridiculousness.
A negative for us (but not for others) is that since we play over lunch break, the original catan we could finish in under an hour with 4 players. Cities and Knights usually takes 4 of us about an hour and a half, most of this being due to the more complex resource distributions (remembering commodity cards, moving the barbarian ships, distributing progress cards, etc). One is almost tempted to institute a rule that if the players forget to ask for a card, they don't get it, because it's too much for a banker to keep track of and slows the game. If you're not under a time constraint though this isn't an issue I suppose.
By Kurt Ro (Philadelphia, PA)
The game can be complicated at first, but once you get the basic gist of it, it is one of the best games EVER.
By Kyley (Gainesville, FL)
The Cities and Knights expansion for Catan is a great purchase. When I read other reviews I was a little concerned that maybe it would be too complicated or add too many little extra things to keep track of to really be fun. This is not the case. The first time my friends and I played, it was slow going, and we did have to keep the rulebook on hand (and we are original Catan veterans), but once you've played two or three times everything falls into place and it's not distracting or difficult to keep track of all the different things you can do.
Also, the new progress cards (which replace the development cards from the original) are really cool. There are less straight-out victory points, and more original things you can do. Our favorites are "the inventor" which lets you switch two numbers on the board other than 2,12,6,8 (i.e. your opponent's ore tile becomes an 11 while your wheat tile becomes a 5) and "the alchemist" which lets you choose your own roll.
The only critiques I have of the game are that it takes a little longer in general than the original to play, there is a lot more stuff to pack up when you're done, and because there are so many more things you can do to your opponents to screw them over, I think this version might generate a little more group hostility than the original version.
All in all though, I am really glad that I made this purchase.
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