I think that if you are going to go out of your way to tinker with the game to this extreme, then you might as well just play a different game and have more fun doing it.
What's your definition of tinkering? It's quite possible that everything you see here is a Teuber created add-on. There's at least three that I immediately spot that are Teuber's doing.
I sincerely hope that this was just a posed picture and not a real game. I count 10(!) players, Cities & Knights, Seafarers, and at least 4 other addons combined with what appears to be a huge map. That is suicidal.
Okay, . . . I can see that someone's painted a basic set to give us purple, black and gold pieces, and I assume some of those little round discs are from Cities and Knights (which I've never played), the ships are obvious, the volcanoes I know about, likewise the jungle tiles . . . the "great river" is a new mini-expansion which I understand is in the current issue of Games Quarterly . . . I see the Fishers of Catan expansion here . . . What's the purpleish cone on the "spring" of the great river? And what's that tile next to it that has a disc with dice on it? And what are those cardboard standees (one visible uppper-left, another center right) and how about the discs with the question marks? There's a horse along the bottom of the picture, and there's some other strange tile between a jungle tile and a mountain tile center-left.
They didn't paint anything. The first two editions of Settlers from Mayfair had different colored wooden pices than the third edition that matched the Kosmos edition. 1st Mayfair Edition - Red, Blue, Green, Yellow 2nd Mayfair Edition - White, Orange, Purple, Black
They're also using some of the terrain tiles from the early Mayfair editions. Notice the difference in some of the ocean tiles, the desert, etc.
The purple cone is the trader from Cities & Knights.
The cardboard stands are the balloons from the great balloon race scenarios from Das Buch. There are several other Das Buch items in the photo, like the magic castle (with the dice icon in the middle).
The man on the horse is Alexander from the Historical Scenarios I, as are the question mark disks.
Of course this isn't a real game. Who ever took the photo just put a sampling of every unique item from their massive Settlers collection in one photo.
Actually the only things I can't identify are the large round cardboard disks under the brown and red cities. They could be city walls. But the city walls I have from Cities and Knights are square and wooden.
The cardboard disks under the cities are indeed city walls -- but from the Kosmos Atlantis scenario set. Also from that same set are the Great River and Fortresses (cardboard rings around the number tokens).
The only "fan-made" item in this shot is the gold-painted pieces.
