Cities and Knights of Catan for two

We had a couple of hours available, so we thought we'd try another game of Cities and Knights, now we're more familiar with it, in the hope of consolidating our expertise somewhat. So we set up the usual random Settlers board, plus all the various bits and pieces needed for this expansion, and build our first settlements (two each, since we're playing the two-player game) and one city each.


Richard (playing red) chose a prime spot for his first city, bordering an ore and two wood, which mean that any time those numbers were rolled he would receive a commodity card in addition to a single resource card, which would enable him, fairly quickly, to start building city improvements. We both had a good range of resources - in particular wheat, necessary for activating knights - and a reasonable spread of numbers, although not as good as either of us would have hoped.

After the first three rounds, when we started using the event die and the barbarian ship came closer to Catan, we bought our first knights and activated them. There have to be as many - or more - knight powers, so to speak, as there are cities on the board. So with four cities, there must be four single-strength knights, or two double-strength, or some other combination. We've never yet had a scenario where the barbarians won with greater strength: if that happens, then whoever is weakest loses a city (which reverts to a settlement). We don't know what happens if the player doesn't actually have any settlements left to play at that stage.

It looked as if Richard was going to have the stronger knights - which would have given him an extra victory point card - but then I picked up the 'Deserter' card. So, just before the barbarians attacked for the first time I played it: meaning that he lost a knight, and I replaced it with another of mine, at equal strength. That gave me the victory point; something that was repeated through the game since my knights remained the stronger army.

We each built a metropolis fairly early in the game, and both retained them. The merchant didn't come into play at all since his card was not picked up. And once ahead, I seemed to stay ahead since Richard didn't pick up any of the cards that can be played against anyone with more victory points.

For once, neither of us claimed the longest street card. I thought about it a couple of times but was still expanding cities and settlements. We'd decided to play to 18 points, and I was the one who got there first.


It wasn't difficult, since I had four victory point cards: three for winning in the barbarian attacks, being 'defender of Catan' with the strongest armies, and one which I'd picked up as a progress card: