Cities & Knights has some problems

This expansion is bold, and with that, comes some glaring issues. First, it really needs a player aid for all of the new mechanics its introducing, where Knight activation and movement really needs to be clarified on a separate sheet.

Actually, this has to go into how Cities & Knights is just visually hard to follow, where you just CAN’T see what tier of upgrades people are at from afar, which matters a lot if you’re trying to beat their upgrade for a Metropolis, which is a 4 point swing! Plus, the Knights, which are one of the most important parts here, are insanely hard to see from afar, as they have a light tan side, and then a grey side.

To make it worse, the commodities look SO similar to their normal resource counterpart in hand. And you’ll often have games where commodities will sit in your hand, because you can only spend them for ONE thing.

For gameplay issues, we haven’t mentioned that when you hit tier 4 on upgrading your flip-sheet, you get a special ability! One of the abilities will let you get a resource of your choosing every single turn you don’t get resources, which is straight insane.

Our biggest complaint with Cities & Knights is its unrealistic time length. The box says 90 minutes, but games will run at least 2-3 hours on your first couple of playtrhoughs. Not only do turns take longer with more to think about, but the game length is just padded out. Like losing a city to invaders will really slow your economy, if not knocking you out of winning contention if done too early. Or how cities, in giving commodities for some hexes, really slow down spending power across the game.

To worsen this issue, Cities & Knights is filled with resource sinks: areas you spend resource on without really advancing the game. Like there’s a city walls, where you spend 2 brick to promote super defensive play of having more cards in hand. But the main culprit here is those darn invaders.

See, while you can play around with having the smallest army, you probably don’t want ZERO Knights, since that puts you at an huge risk for losing a City if the invasion fails but everyone else has just 1 Knight. Plus, every time they face the invaders, regardless of outcome, all the Knights are exhausted because they’re lazy bums, so that’s a lot of wheat your group needs to spend to revive them! A lot of stuff that would usually go into making people’s economies better to steadily advance the board, goes into maintaining greedy dudes, and then someone will every so often will get 1 victory point from that, for a game where you need THIRTEEN points to win.

Those are the glaring issues— now we have some nitpicks that depending on how you play Catan, might not be such a bad thing.

First off is how the randomness is not handled healthily. So first off, you really really need a Sheep and Stone early on to build a Knight, for the first invader attack, otherwise losing a City within the first couple of rounds basically knocks you out of the game. There IS a variant that you don’t roll the event die during the first 2 rounds, and we’re surprised why that isn’t in the initial game.

Plus, development cards being pretty unbalanced and being entirely given at random through die rolls can lead to some pretty big variance of take-that outcomes that base Catan did not have nearly as much as. There’s currently ways to replace other’s nights with your own, swap hex numbers on the board, or even make people who are stockpiling tons of cards with city walls, discard half of them!

We got a lot more conclusions on Cities & Knights below, but hey, there’s 2 more boxes to cover!

Traders & Barbarians

Traders & Barbarians is an entirely new direction with MODULES. This is 5 easily digestible tweaks to base Catan, with 4 smaller variants that can be done with any type of Catan you’re playing.

Smaller variants can be written rules to not robber certain players, or actual components like the “Harbormaster”, which is a new largest ‘blank’ thing to fight over. It gives 2 VP for settling a lot next to harbors. This technically adds a streamlined way to get more points, but it can make the game feel less tight as people can double down on where they’re already doing well to close out the game, and there’s probably not gonna be more than 2 people ever competing for this.

Or then there’s the event deck, because if you HATE DICE, this replaces it! No more weird stuff like constantly rolling 9’s in a row and 6 only once a game… WHY DOES IT HAPPEN TO ME. Now, you’ll see almost every card, where you set up the deck so that once you’re almost done with it, you reset off a new year card. So no counting cards! It also hilariously introduces some other randomness through events tied to card flips, and so when you read a card every turn, that can be a bit fiddly and make the game feel like a party mode with random events. It’s not anything too extreme, just silly stuff like slowing down road building through an earthquaaaake, or you pass cards to the left to the left! Oh and it slightly benefits getting longest road and largest army.

And there’s a 2P variant we haven’t tried, I mean there is Rivals for Catan for 2P Catan, but hey, cool way to have any Catan expansion be 2P now?

As for the full-fledged modules, let’s start with the Fishermen of Catan, a really simple addition of adding “Fish” bearing spaces to the board, whether it be from settling next to the coast, or next to a Lake that has replaced the classic Desert hex. These tokens are hidden, and have between 1-3 on them, and then you can spend them to steal from people, get resources of your wanting from the bank, or even build stuff! Then you play to 12 points to win.

So yeah, the fish are great, since you just end up having a good amount more options every turn, where they’re like a resource, that don’t clog up the hand, and are hidden for some mind games. For every turn, it’s like an extra phase of spending more stuff! The road counterplay here is great, where someone can build 2 roads suddenly by spending a bunch of fish. Plus, building stuff is a little more nuanced, as settling next to the lake or the harbors is better than before.

There’s only one REAL problem, where there’s this really weird fish income rule: if there are not enough facedown fish tokens to fulfill everyone’s production on a roll, then no one receives fish tokens that turn. That is super wonky, since you can have many rolls with 2 people next to fish, and so they need to take 2 fish tokens, but can’t. So then fish income totally stagnates. We were ok with entirely taking out this rule, but you could play around with randomly rolling to see which players get the remaining fish if there’s not enough, or having the fish tokens reset themselves after 1 roll of no one being able to get fish.

And then there’s some component issues of the fish tokens not feeling great and looking like an afterthought in visual design, or the nitpick how the one person who is left out of the lake early game in 4 player games will basically always robber the lake because its too good. But these are whatever, let’s zoom ahead to the 5th module!

The Actual Traders & Barbarians

This module is literally called Traders & Barbarians, and its a little weird, where it introduces WAGONS to the game! See, you play as FedEx, where you pick up tokens from one of the 3 edge hexes, then drop off tokens into another. To do that, Wagons can move after you finish your normal turn, where they can move slowly across the map. But then if they move on a road, they can move faster! If they move on an opponent’s road, they still move faster but you have to pay them! If they move through a barbarian in the way, it really slows down their movement!

Why put in all this effort? Well, you get 1 point AND some money when you complete an amazon prime drop-off, and money is great because you can spend it to become any resource in the game!

Last thing: you replace the development deck with a new dev deck of 4 cards: mostly knights, some hidden VP, Road Building, and move your Wagon.

The cool thing about Traders & Barbarians is that you always have a feeling of doing SOMETHING on your turn, where you’re always moving your Wagon despite what happens with the die roll. The Wagon moving basically twice as fast by roads makes roads EXTREMELY important, as you try to build as many roads as you can to make your movement better, and tax your opponents as they pay you. It’s still Catan rules where roads are permanent, so there’s definitely a rush to place them on key areas before your opponents do.

There’s no more robber too, just 3 Barbarians who stand in the middle of routes, and so when you roll a 7, its a quick intuitive change of not blockading players’ hexes, but blockading their routes! You can even use your wagon to kick out Barbarians to make you think about Wagon positioning some more!

The Wagon is basically EVERYTHING about this variant, and upgrading it to move like crazy is extremely satisfying, paired with how you get MORE money for each drop-off! This gives you a second economy in the game on top of doing the normal Catan thing of rolling dice for resources! This module is a smooth tradeoff between upgrading your wagon, or building roads, or just doing normal Catan building.

Plus, being able to trade money is cool, like you can always throw one in with a card if you don’t quite want to trade 2 cards away. Like the only ‘bad’ things we could dig up on Traders & Barbarians is how the Wagons can kind of look like cities from afar, or how you’ll need a couple plastic bags for the good amount of pieces you’re getting in here. So really whatever stuff.

This module right here is just the weirdest Catan experience we’ve ever had, even after playing all the expansions, because the faster you pick up and deliver with your wagon, the more points you get, so creating actual cities and settlements takes a huge backseat. Is pick-up-and-deliver for you, in this pseudo Catan system, where you’re building roads for everyone’s Wagon, not for buildings?

Explorers & Pirates

This final, 4th expansion is a return back to ships! But they’re not the Seafarers ships that are like Roads 2.0, these are proper ships that sail across the map… a much bigger map! You move each of your ships every turn, sailing the seas to discover new lands to drop off settlers you have loaded onto the ships! Oh and you may find pirates you need to FIGHT off with crews of fighters in your ships!

Also, when you don’t get resources on the roll on a turn, you automatically get 1 gold, and if you ever spend 2 of them, they become any resource you want, yeah very similar to Traders & Barbarians gold. Basically, you get something every turn no matter what the roll is, unless its a 7, then no resources.

To solidify this being the MOST laid-back expansion of all, you take out every development card, and bonus scoring tiles, yep, focus on the ships. The title checks out, first explore for your points, where building, mostly on the new islands, is the main way to get points. Then, pirates, where you can have a scenario that gives points by discovering and killing pirates with hired soldiers.

Good stuff about this more relaxed Catan? Well it has the BEST wooden pieces out of all the Catan boxes. You got soldiers, settlers, harbors, and different ships… and some of these are meant to be physically loaded onto the ships!

That sounds like some gameplay, so Explorers & Pirates definitely gives the most feeling of adventure, where it feels super thematic to be building settlers to load them on ships, then sail them out to the middle of nowhere and see what lands they explore- and maybe you’ll get water- so the distant islands will look different every game. It’s definitely a fitting story to sail forth, make a Settlement far away, then eventually upgrade that into a Harbor to build ships on that faraway land, using it as a beachhead to explore MORE locations!

With all the water and sailing, Roads definitely take a backseat, where positioning ships is very important throughout the game, and you move all of them, so moving multiple ships whether it’s to pick up, or deliver things, is the end of every turn! Plus, you can increase your ship movement by spending wool, and you DON’T need roads to build settlements, so its very possible to cut off other players’ road building!

Last cool thing is that this runs extremely true to time for the 1st scenario, but then Explorers & Pirates starts to run too long in the 2nd scenario, which throws in all of the new tricks, like hiring your own pirate ship, which can really slow down everyone’s movement when you have 4 pirate ships (one for each player) blockading areas on the board. Plus, remember how development cards and scoring tiles (e.g. Largest Army) are taken out, and everyone has an additional phase to their turn of moving ships… and you play to 12 points. To fill in that void of points, you want to find and do violent things to pirates, but if the pirates are further on the map, the game can take longer. 10 points id definitely more of a fitting time length.

Then some of the printing for pieces was entirely cut off in our copy, and wooden pieces would fall of ships while playing constantly. But the game is still playable with those gripes.

Oh, and depending on how you approach Catan, Explorers & Pirates might not feel interactive enough for you- where even though there is settling counterplay and pirate ship placement, making the map about 2x as big just loosens up the game. You’re especially not focusing on road building as you move ships instead, and everyone has gold to spend for any resource to decrease trading incentives a bit. So sure, there’s no point swings from Longest Road/Largest army anymore, but hey, Explorers & Pirates is the ONLY way to play Catan without ever losing victory points, which some may like.

The last nitpick is that this expansion is the most annoying to organize out of the 4, with no included insert, and just has the most map tiles because it introduces a much bigger map, for a slightly longer setup time than the rest.

The important thing to get out of Explorers & Pirates is that it is very friendly feeling, where you get a thing EVERY turn no matter what, and just wants you to revel in the feeling of exploring and not worry about mind game competition or competing over the longest X. It also is entirely pick-up-and-deliver oriented to pick up things and sail them somewhere else.

Final Thoughts

Disclaimer: for this review we couldn’t play as much of these as we normally do, but definitely felt like we got the gist of each with our mostly 2 plays of each. If something remarkably good or bad comes up in the unplayed scenarios then screw us, that would change these scores which we currently stand by.

As a nice baseline, we would rate Catan a 7/10, which is good. It has a lot of game mechanics presented in a streamlined friendly way, from hand management, trading, competing over public goals, hex counterplay, and looks very visually sharp!

A big X-factor for Catan is just how accessible it is, and that is ALSO because of how relevant it is in modern culture, so it’s kind of cheating compared to most games we cover. It’s biggest problem is its huge dependence on initial building placement, which matters a LOT for a game that can run up to an hour. If you watch tournament vlogs, they KEEP talking about initial placement, its kind of hilarious how much it matters. This initial placement issue ends up aggravating the sole reliance on dice rolling to get things.

Then, note that some of the scores were really hard to give out, because parts of some don’t really feel like an expansion but an entirely new game (Catan + Pick-Up-and-Deliver!). But first let’s talk about Cities & Knights, which really stood out, and could have been better received if it wasn’t so difficult to keep track of, and/or ran much shorter in length.

Cities & Knights has a lot of bold ideas that feel like they’re stretching Catan’s core ideas TOO hard- like there’s more to do, with wackier sorts of income, and the actual wooden Knights proves to be a mandatory resource sink. The player interaction from said knights is clever, but consequences from invaders can be too punishing early on, and often requires tons of wheat upkeep to fend off these random attacks.

And remember how we said Catan’s issue was that initial placement matters TOO much? Well Cities & Knights aggravates that issue in 2 ways, where 1), you really need early income to get your development card engine and knight defenses up, and 2), it being a longer game means that poor initial placement leaves you practically removed out of winning contention for longer.

See, Cities & Knights is so weird because it feels catered towards more studious, hardcore Catan players that would be more careful with this initial placement, and maybe enjoy more cutthroatness and overall complexity. But at the same time, Cities & Knights handles randomness worse than base, with its new development cards feeling zany at times, so efforts to play well aren’t rewarded as much.

Cities & Knights has earned our respect in how much it creatively tweaks, well, cities and knights. But in 2022, it’s a tough sell. See, if we were making this review when it came out at 1998, 24 years ago, then sure, the score might be a 6 or 7/10… but hey YouTube didn’t even exist back then so Shelfside wouldn’t exist. Today, if you’re playing Catan, you’re probably playing it for its simplicity and casualness.

If you’re getting your first expansion, we recommend either Seafarers OR Traders & Barbarians. Seafarers is a lot more straightforward and easy to learn, but that also is because of how vanilla and basic it is. So, if you’re feeling more adventurous, Traders & Barbarians is much better bang for buck, heck scratch that, its the best bang for buck out of any of these boxes. It’s first module is a nice incremental step, and there’s plenty of smaller modules to mix into any Catan you play. Then, for its weirdness that we tried, the Wagon module is Catan: Amazon delivery edition which is just so strange in how you view roads.

If we had to guess, Traders & Barbarians probably doesn’t get that much appreciation because it came late in Catan’s cycle, at 2007, when the type of Catan fans who would really look into expansions probably moved onto to other games, and/or stuck with the first two expansions. After all, each expansion is $60, so don’t blame them. Also, it’s pretty confusing to even tell what Traders & Barbarians is because it has such a mish-mash identity- it just throws in 5 pretty unrelated scenarios, some of which are SO different from base Catan it’s hard to say they would all be as guaranteed a hit as Seafarers’ gentle additions.

The finale, Explorers & Pirates is a return back to EXPLORING, but way more so than Seafarers, adding the most buying options, making outside hexes random, and with a much bigger map than the other expansions. It makes Catan feel like Catan- Age of Discovery where you load up ships, playing as some type of Columbus to fight ‘pirates’. It’s the most ideal ‘screw around/sandbox’ Catan for those wanting a little more mechanics, where you always get something every turn and there’s just more to spend on. So, if you thought Catan gameplay was cool but irritating because of poor rolls, or too much meanness, this can be for you!

You can see the little bits of DNA from the previous expansions here, with the pick and deliver with gold from Traders, the exploration with ships and gold hexes from Seafarers, and a little bit of working together to defeat a common foe from Cities & Knights. Its lax-ness makes us easily seeing this house ruled to play with 2 people for a gentle colonizing time, even though we haven’t tried that.

To end, do note that none of these expansions really help fix our core issues with Catan, as that would mostly involve making the game shorter and then just overhauling resource income… which doesn’t really sound like Catan and probably would not even sell well anyways. For more info on our personal scores, a ranking of all the expansions, or just more in depth about each, check out the video below!