First game of Cities and Knights

As well as Seafarers of Catan, we were given the Cities and Knights expansion for Christmas. Tim has played it before, both as a board game and online, although not for a while. And of course we had the instruction booklet. We'd looked through the pieces already and put the stickers on the knights, and it all seemed very complicated. Yesterday evening, Tim looked through the instructions, and we had a three-person game, deciding to play to 15 points since the recommendation was 13.

The initial setup is much like ordinary Settlers, using the same hex tiles and sea surround, and the numbers. Instead of placing two settlements in the setup phase, a settlement is placed first, and then a city on the return round, although as usual just one of each resource is taken.

However, there are also a set of 'commodity' cards: paper, cloth and coins, which come respectively from the same hexes as wood, sheep and ore. And there are three sets of 'progress cards' which totally replace the usual development cards. They are shown with yellow, green and blue flags on the back, and have a wide variety of possible actions, described in full in the instruction booklet.


The usual building cards aren't needed at all; instead there are nifty flip booklets, which show not just the basic building costs, the same as in the original Settlers game, but also new possibilities, enabling us to buy and activate knights, city walls, and also various additions to our cities:


To add to the complexity, there's an extra dice, three of whose faces show a barbarian ship, while the other three show blue, green or yellow city tiles. There's an extra little board where the barbarian ship slowly advances towards Catan, whenever the ship is rolled, to - potentially - attack the cities which are built. There must be sufficient knights to conquer the barbarians, and they are placed in intersections between roads. The round blue thing is a knight; on a white background because he wasn't activated at that point.


The yellow thing on top of the city is a metropolis, which comes after building the maximum number of additions to the city through using the commodity cards.

Confused?

I certainly was. So we played, and Tim gradually explained the rules with occasional reference to the instructions. We didn't get everything right - this morning I read the booklet through entirely - but we had a good game. It was much more tiring than the regular Settlers of Catan game, because we had to think so much more!


Despite finding it confusing, I eventually won. Probably because of my good choice of initial placements.