I have third edition Settlers so I figured I'd better try out a couple of the expansions to see if I wanted them before they disappeared from the shops completely. Cities and Knights is very highly rated by my geekbuddies so it seemed like an obvious one to check out first.

Premise

Cities & Knights expands on the original Settlers by making it feel much more like what the theme of the original (arguably) ought to have been like in the first place - a civilisation game. The biggest change is that cities have gone from being simple super-producers to powerhouses of industrial development that can net you many advantages in the game from new and unusual cards to extra victory points. There are also new military units in the game, knights, which can be used to chase off the robber, fight off barbarian invasions and (in a limited way) attack the infrastructure of your opponents.

Rules

I personally found that Cities and Knights added a fairly significant weight to the rules of the original - there's probably as much again to learn and some of it is not terribly intuitive. This is in contrast to the other popular expansion, Seafarers, which is incredibly simple.

As usual, if you're seriously considering this as a purchase, you'll get a better idea of the rules and indeed the game by reading the actual rules instead of the short summary I'm about to provide. They're freely available online - so go Google. The summary assumes familiarity with the rules of the original game.

You'll notice most of the differences during setup. For starters the dice have changed - you now need to roll white and red coloured dice and a special "event" dice as well. Mountains, Forest and Pasture hexes can now produce new "commodities" as well as their traditional resources. The board now has a "barbarian" marker and a track for it to move along toward the island in addition to the robber. Finally you'll notice that there are new decks of "progress" cards and a flip chart for each player which they use to track city developments.

They basis to most of the new system are the commodity cards. In the expansion when a city produces Ore, Lumber or Wool it produces one of the resources and a matching commodity instead of two resources. These commodities are used to pay for city developments in a matching colour - one card for level one, two for level two and so on - so you pay the cards and flip that portion of your flip chart over to show your progress. Level three gets you a special ability and levels four and five net you victory points.

Now when you roll the dice you need to check the event dice first. If it's a ship then the barbarians move one step on their track toward the island. If it's a city gate then each player who has a city development in the colour matching the gate can check the red dice - if it's lower than the level of development which matches the gate colour they get a progress card. The progress cards replace the event cards from the original game and have a much wider range of effects - you can sabotage other players' roads, knights and cities, get trades from the bank at 2:1, steal or trade resources and commodities from other players at favourable terms to you and lots of other stuff including most of the effects from the original event deck.

The other big addition are the knights. These come in three levels, cost one ore and one wool to build in the first place and the same to promote to the next level and must also be "activated" by paying a wheat before they can be used. They appear on road junctions and have various uses - they can chase off the robber on an adjacent hex, chase away other players knights of a lesser level, interrupt "longest road" claims by sitting in the middle of one and, since other players can't put knights or settlements where one of your knights is, act as placeholders for where you want to build. They also defend Catan whenever the barbarians land. This is done by adding up all the levels of active knights on the board against the number of cities. If there are more knights than cities then the knights win and the player(s) who contributed the most strength get a bonus. If there are more cities than knights then the barbarians win and the player(s) who contributed the least strength have a city downgraded to a Settlement.

Gameplay - Good Stuff

My favourite thing about playing with this expansion in place is the progress cards. There's such a variety of them that they really do add to the tactics available to pursue in the game and many of them also give you the added satisfaction of being able to knobble other players. The knights are also good, especially the way they can sit on junctions and deny them to other players. These two aspects do dramatically raise the level of direct interaction without turning it into an outright conflict game. Sure you can now play a form of screw-the-leader and perhaps more importantly you can also play screw-the-person-who-last-screwed-you sending up the amount of table chat significantly especially considering that there's two way feedback between bias in trading and bias in the use of progress cards and knights. They both feed into a loop of conflict that can escalate deliciously and adds spice to the slightly tame trading in the original, although trading based purely on mix-maxing can still occur.

The extra sources of victory points in the game from cards and city developments has the welcome impact of making it less likely that a player can get "boxed in" and be unable to score more VP after mid-game which happened quite frequently in the original. You can still get boxed in, sure, but if it happens there's other avenues you can explore for your VP which don't require you to have space to expand and found new settlements. You can go for points from getting level 4 city developments or points from being the "defender of Catan" - the player with the most active knight levels when the barbarians arrive.

In my first couple of games with C&K, I really didn't get much out of it. As it turns out that was because I was treating it like basic Settlers and playing it the same way and C&K actually changes the base game quite drastically, although you might not spot it at first. The game now revolves a lot more around Cities (as you might guess from the title) because these are the only source you have of commodities and through them, progress cards. So C&K does manage to turn the base game into something new whilst recognisably still being a game of Settlers. It deserves to be applauded for this feat, but it is something of a double-edged sword, as we'll discuss in the next section.

Gameplay - Bad Stuff

My biggest problem with Cities & Knights is simply that it doesn't actually add much, in terms of strategy, to the decision making in the game. The original settlers was a game in which making good choices for your starting locations was paramount, and was then a matter of spending your resources as wisely as possible. It derived most of its excitement from watching the dice roll and most of its tension from racing other players to secure access to the best settlement spots on the map. Cities & Knights achieves it's satisfaction and the basis of it's strategy in exactly the same way. Sure it throws a few new tactics in to the mix but once you've seen that variety and got the hang of the fact that VPs now come mainly from Cities and from Knights there's actually very little new here, which doesn't bode well for the amount of longevity it adds to the game.

Because there's an extra dice to roll and because the precise value of one of the dice is now critical to your acquisition of progress cards, random factors have a greater impact here than they do in the original. This doesn't bother me at all but it might bother you. The one fallout from this that did irritate me slightly is that it's possible for one player to have a city knobbled on the first barbarian visit through no fault of their own, and that player has likely just lost the game. This doesn't happen often though and if it does, it's easy enough to restart - or you could just play with a house rule to correct it.

A rather unfortunate aspect of the expansion is that it turns a game which is very firmly a family-friendly Euro into a game that is kind of like a civilisation building game, but isn't. Played with C&K, Settlers is harder to learn, around an hour longer, and has the potential for a lot more screwage. The result doesn't quite know what sort of game it wants to be and might well not satisfy either Eurogamers or more conflict-oriented players. It's now too long, complex and nasty to be much of a family game but doesn't have enough confrontation, options or diplomatic elements to please as a civilisation game.

Comparisons

It's kind of strange trying to think of comparisons to make with an expansion set. However one fairly obvious one is to compare it with the other ubiquitous Settlers expansion, Seafarers of Catan. The contrast is marked - Seafarers adds very little complexity but does actually change the positional strategy of the game because of the requirement to start ship chains from a settlement or city. It also provides more potential variety and longevity to the game through the inclusion of scenarios. On balance this is kind of more what I expect an expansion to do - it changes the base game much less radically and adds quite a bit at very little cost. I'd say I prefer it over Cities & Knights, but only marginally.

The other comparison I can think of is a lot less direct and thus a lot less informative and that's to put it side by side with Mare Nostrum. Both games are euro-style civilisation games and both have roughly comparable amounts of complexity and play time. However, MN is a direct conflict game in which cross-table diplomacy features heavily whereas C&K creates a resource management game in which conflict and table-talk are present, but take a back seat. Even with it's minor balance issues, I'd take Mare Nostrum over C&K every time, but your mileage may vary.

Conclusions

C&K certainly is a pretty good expansion on the whole, but it's not one I can heartily recommend. The comparison with Mare Nostrum illustrates why - it pushes Settlers into a realm of play time and complexity where there are simply other games that I'd rather play in preference to C&K. For me the simplicity and relative speed of the original game was part of it's charm - it made it a great family game. If I'm with a group of gamers who'll sit down to a 2-3 hour game of moderate complexity then I can do better than Settlers with knobs on. The fact that although it adds a lot of options, but doesn't seem to add a lot of gameplay, doesn't really help increase it's appeal. The bottom line is that even with C&K around, I can see myself pulling out the original fairly frequently.

But when it comes to giving out a rating it's certainly not bad, and I would certainly play a game with the expansion in force if it was the choice of the group. And there are groups of gamers that I could see really enjoying this. If you tend to shy away from games with warfare or negotiation but fancy just a little bit to spice up your game sessions from time to time then C&K might be just the thing for you. But I'm going to be sticking with the base game for the most part, so on balance, a seven seems to be about on the money here.