When my eldest son brought Settlers of Catan back with him from summer camp four years ago it brought heavy board gaming into our family and helped accelerate my return to serious gaming as well. We've played the core Settlers of Catan game many times and had great fun in those sessions.

So it was that we decided to expand out and try the Cities and Knights version as well. As the title of this review indicates, it is not a bad game. However, the amount of complexity and gameplay time it adds to Settlers of Catan really turns it into something of a different game. In our house, Settlers is a 1-2 hour game. Cities & Knights adds at least an hour onto that. Plus, the various additions to the game raise the game a full level of weight/complexity, making it harder to teach and get started with. If a game is going to be more of medium complexity and take over three hours, there are much better and more interesting game to play that expanding Settlers of Catan into the Cities & Knights version. It is a decent game and worth playing, but why restrict yourself to a sub-optimal expanded core game than a game designed to be longer and more complex to begin with?

Here are some of the differences and my thoughts about them:

1. Introduction of an invading barbarian fleet, and knights that players can build to protect against barbarians, as well as provide tactical advantages against other players. This is perhaps the worst part of the Cities & Knights expansion. Albeit with limited plays, we've never once had a successful barbarian attack. People build up enough initial knights to prevent an early attack, and the cities do not go up quickly enough to outpace further knight development. It is just a huge ado about nothing. So, if you reduce the idea of a barbarian invasion to an afterthought, all of the rules and infrastructure around knights are very little bang for very little buck. Sure, knights can do some interesting things like block roads, but between the costs for their purchase, promotion, activation and re-activation, it is way too much for something of nominal value. In addition, the introduction of "city walls" are similarly wasted thanks to the impotence of the "barbarian invasion".

2. The ability to build a wide variety of city improvements. Again, the implementation is not worthy of the idea. While they came up with a lot of interesting improvements, the way to see and track them is with an innovative flip card that has three independent panels, tracking three different tracks improvement tracks. Unfortunately, owing to this card mechanic, the process of buying improvements is strictly orchestrated without opportunity for strategic decision making or even aesthetic choice. You just need to keep buying the next building on a linear track. So while this does add some strategic interest and complexity to the game, it suffers from what many Euros are accused of: pasting on a theme that doesn't really mechanically work in a reasonable way.

3. All of these improvements are governed by the addition of three Commodity cards - coin, paper and cloth. Each is tied to three of the original five resources, stone (coin), wood (paper) and sheep (cloth). When you have a city on one of these tiles instead of a settlement, you get one each of these along with one of the resources (as opposed to two resources) when the number is rolled. These create a little bit of confusion, as the terms "resource" and "commodity" - while clearly different in a definition sense - require some thinking to be sure what someone is talking about when actions happen. Plus, while I do think using cards similar to the resources was a smart way to handle these additional assets in the game, it also contributes to the "pasted on" feeling of the expansion.

If you're really in love with Settlers and are committed to expanding it, Cities & Knights is fine. But if you love Settlers and just want to step up to the next level of gaming, try out something entirely new:

- Puerto Rico, if you want the next level of resource management
- Friedrich, if you want to play a fun military game
- Traders of Genoa, if you want to try a more complex trading game

And again, we really enjoy Settlers, so this is certainly not a knock on the series as a whole. But there are a lot of great games out there, and it would be worth your time to try something new.