Everyone I know can point to a game that brought them into the fold as a modern hobby gamer…and for me, that game was CATAN: Cities & Knights, first released in 1998.
I don’t exactly remember when I first played Cities & Knights (C&K), but I do remember a lot of the other details. My friends Terry and Erin invited me over to their apartment in the Chicagoland area for a game night during one of my trips to the city before moving there. My buddy Dave, another guy in my network at the time, joined us, and we did my first play.
Even though C&K is an expansion, it was actually my first time playing any of the CATAN games. I remember thinking that C&K had a lot of rules—which is a little funny now, since I was a huge fan of the game Battlefield America at the time. Battlefield America was one of the games in the 1980s “Gamemaster” series published by Milton Bradley that included two other classics from my time growing up, Shogun and Axis & Allies, the clear winner in the popularity contest that has covered the last 40+ years.
Still, I remember being OK with all the rules because I had begun to hear more about this whole CATAN thing through other friends. I was excited to find someone in my network who had a copy and wanted to show it off. The magic kicked off early, and I remember loving the way trading worked, the ways players had to manage their hand of resources, the way commodities added spice with the fun little flip chart that is used to track upgrades to each player’s burgeoning community.
That first play took hours, long enough that I still remember needing to rush off because our game took a lot longer than I had planned for. Dave and I talked about the game afterwards and I remember feeling like I needed to own a copy of the game…and even getting a copy was its own adventure.
If you wanted to get your hands on a copy of a true hobby game in the late 90s/early aughts, you had to get creative. Nowadays, you can buy a copy of CATAN at your local Target…any Target, anywhere in the world. Back then, you had to go to hobby stores so local that some of them were a little spooky. NFL linemen now play CATAN to bond during bye weeks, so the image of a modern nerd is sort of a joke. In, say, 1999 or 2000, when you walked into a hobby store, you made sure you went alone, without friends, unless those friends were just as much of a nerd as you were.
The great news, though? CATAN was a big deal even back then, so every hobby store had at least the base game. I needed both CATAN and the C&K expansion, so I remember hunting at a couple of stores until I found what I needed. Once I was armed and ready, I made sure to show CATAN to everyone I knew.
Back in the DC area, I was always excited to show off CATAN—for US audiences, this was a big discovery in that early aughts timeframe—but I really struggled to get my friends to buy into what CATAN was going for. Trading resources? Tough. Playing to 13 victory points (the C&K win condition, higher than base CATAN) sometimes meant games with four players might take two hours or more. And that was before I did my first six-player C&K game with the 5-6 Player expansion…that game, with friends in Chicago after making the move to the city, was the first and last time I tried C&K with a six-player audience.
Catch Up
CATAN: Cities & Knights is still, both 20 years ago and now, my preferred way to play CATAN. The trading is still there, the initial placement rules are still vital, and I still only try to play CATAN with a four-player group because at three players, the map is too open. Figuring out where to place that first settlement still brings joy, and waiting for the roll of the dice to come up aces for me and my production engine still just works, man.
But I prefer C&K because of the commodities. The commodities—paper, cloth, and coins—are the goodies produced by cities adjacent to forest, pasture, and mountain hexes, respectively. Those commodities are the items needed to advance the “Development Flip-Chart”, which is the guide players use to determine when they trigger the draw of Progress cards. Progress cards, which replace the Development cards from base CATAN, are fantastic. More importantly, a number of the Progress cards shake up the balance, particularly cards from the blue deck (tied to military strength, flipped with the spend of coin commodities) for players who are behind on victory points.
The worst part of base CATAN, in my view: once a player gets to eight or nine points, they are probably going to win the game thanks to the 10 VP victory condition…it’s just a question of when, especially if they have seven or eight points on the board (via cities and settlements, maybe a Longest Road or Largest Army tile) and one or two Development cards face-down in their play area. At that point, no sensible adult is going to trade with that person, since they are on the doorstep of winning anyway. (This is another reason why I don’t like playing with less than four players…at three players, that means one player is not available for any trading, in a game that almost always requires trading to advance one’s personal agenda.)
C&K fixes some of this. I have absolutely traded with a player sitting on 11 or 12 points in C&K, especially when it is my turn and I might have a chance to come from behind and sneak out a win thanks to all the ways a person can score in C&K on a big turn. Metropolis tokens add a couple points, a late building action might seal it, and being able to rob players ahead in victory points all lead to more dramatic endings than what I have seen in the base game.
C&K does run a little too long, but I find the ending is always pretty accelerated. The first hour to 90 minutes might be average fare, but the final 15 minutes shoot right into the galaxy, especially for players who have built out their flip-chart and a number of the castle symbols are rolled late.
It’s Not All Roses
Every so often, a play of Cities & Knights demolishes a player in the first round who didn’t build a knight in time for the first barbarian attack, leveling one of their cities. Poor die rolls for production, combined with more-frequent-than-normal rolls of the “black ship” symbol on the special die, might lead to that happening in some games. That usually means the entire table is slowed down by a player’s loss of a city, and that can be miserable.
Also, I find that new players don’t use their knights effectively in their first few plays to displace the robber or block other players from building additional settlements. Some of the green Progress cards are strictly better than other cards (everyone has their own Inventor horror story, which is the card that allows a player to swap certain number tokens to shake up production), and one Progress card in each deck is a victory point card, which always feels swingy if you are not the lucky winner of that sweepstakes.
In that way, I acknowledge that C&K is not a perfect game. No problem…it’s the perfect game for me, despite its design challenges, because it’s the game that brought me into the hobby. My wife is perfect…for me. My video game collection is perfect…for me. And in that way, despite CATAN haters around the world going out of their way to diss C&K, I am all in on how much I love breaking it out from time to time.
The Babies
I first showed my kids Cities & Knights only about a year ago. I started them out on CATAN Junior when they were old enough to understand the trading mechanics, then showed them base CATAN just once, so that they could see how the system really worked.
But since then, we only play CATAN: Cities & Knights. And they love it for the same reasons that I do, with the catch-up mechanisms always rising to the top of the commentary. They love the flip charts. They love offering mismatched, sometimes wildly uneven trades to their opponents. They love the dopamine hit when they roll a number that triggers two hexes where they have a structure. They love getting to level four on a flip-chart to acquire a Metropolis. They love playing cards like Resource Monopoly right after everyone has just collected two of a single resource.
I think the kids just love CATAN, but during recent plays of CATAN: Traders & Barbarians, both kids expressed the desire to go back to Cities & Knights. Maybe I have spoiled them by only enjoying my favorite version of the system…and maybe I am OK with that!
Most importantly, I love game night with the kids featuring games that both they love, and I love as well. I can’t get anyone in my hobbyist game network to touch CATAN games with a 10-foot-pole, but the kids are interested in gatekeeping my desire to keep the flame alive. If you can get CATAN: Cities & Knights to the table, just know that at least one person out there loves Cities & Knights as much as you do!
