Cities and Knights for two

It had been some time since we'd played Cities and Knights, after a busy few weeks. Last night I was pretty tired, but Richard felt stressed and wanted a game to help him relax. I don't find Cities and Knights particularly relaxing, but he does... so we set it up. I really wasn't 'with it', and forgot entirely to take a photo after our initial setup (two settlements and one city each) - but here's how the game looked after the first few moves:


We'd both managed to build streets and an extra settlement on the coast, and I'd upgraded one of my initial ones to a city. So we were fairly even. On balance I think I had slightly better numbers: although I didn't have access to 6, I had a city on a sheep-8 hex, and a settlement on a wheat-8 hex which is the one I upgraded quickly to a city. Neither of us had much access to wood or clay, which showed... we didn't do a whole lot of expanding outwards at all.

I then forgot to take a picture the first time the barbarians landed. I was ahead on knights at that point, so gained an extra victory point for my pains, and the barbarians were vanquished.

By the time they arrived for their second attack, I'd managed to build a 'coin' metropolis:


We had the same number of knights, so both took progress cards of our choice. I opted for a green one, since they're usually the nicest. I didn't have many 'book' commodity cards at all, not having much access to wood. However, I did pick up quite a few 'cloth'-related yellow cards, including the merchant early in the game. I placed him on ore, since I was getting a fair amount, and there he stayed.

By the third - and, as it turned out, final - barbarian attack, Richard had claimed the metropolis on books. He also had more knights than I did, so took an extra victory point card. I had 15 points including the merchant, and Richard had 13. So we were still pretty close.


It wasn't long before I was able to build my final city, and then I managed to claim the final metropolis, for cloth. Anyone who cares about points would realise that this gave me 18 - still including the merchant, and my 'defender of Catan' card from the first barbarian attack - but somehow neither of us noticed. Richard also built an extra city, and was planning to join up his two sections of roads to take the 'longest street' card, which I'd pretty much forgotten about.

Not realising that we should have stopped the game already (we end at 18 points) I managed to get enough cards for another settlement. I was about to build it when I realised that neither of us had more than four contiguous sections of road... so whereas I could play my four settlement resources to gain one more point, I could also build just one road, using only two resources, and gain two points for the 'longest street'. It occurred to me that I must be not far off 18.... so I counted up and realised that I should have won already.


I built the street anyway, and thus won with 20 points.