Hi! It’s Ryan from Nights Around a Table, and
this is Catan: Cities & Knights, an expansion for Catan, which is correctly pronounced “Catan,”
but i’m on a diet. This expansion doesn’t contain everything
you need to play - you MUST own a copy of the base game of Catan. This box adds extra pieces and rules to make
the game deeper, more strategic, and significantly longer. Most of the base game rules still apply. If you’d like a refresher, or you’ve never
played Catan, check out my How to Play Catan video. Otherwise, stick around, and let me show you
how to play Cities & Knights! You and your friends are competing to control
Catan as usual, but you face the threat of an offshore boat full of barbarians bearing
down on the island. If you thought your local robber was bad news,
you ain’t seen nothing yet. The barbarians creep slowly towards the island,
and when they reach its shores, all players must contribute to the defense of Catan using
their knights, or risk getting one of their cities sacked! The cities themselves are more advanced than
in the base game. You can upgrade them along three different
skill trees to earn special abilities, powerful new Progress cards, and metropolis gates that
protect you from the barbarians. Cities can now produce three unique commodities,
and you can build walls around them to be able to carry more cards. At the end of the game, whoever has developed
the most powerful and well-defended island empire wins! NEW COMPONENTS Most of the components from the base game
are still in play, but the development deck is replaced by these three Progress card decks. There’s no more Largest Army card, and you
can chuck out the base game’s recipe cards and give everyone one of these spiral bound
city improvement booklets. The recipes for building different things
are written across the top of every page. There are three new types of goodies you can
collect from the map when your numbers are rolled, in addition to the five basic resources. These new cards are called commodities, and
you can only earn them with your cities - paper from a city on a forest, coin from a city
on a mountain, and cloth from a city on a pasture. So in the base game, if a 6 was rolled, this
city would normally produce 2 wood, but in Cities & Knights, it produces 1 wood and 1
paper. A city on a pasture produces 1 sheep and 1
cloth, and a city on a mountain produces 1 ore and 1 coin. If the robber is on the tile, it blocks production
of resources AND commodities. If, instead, this structure was a settlement,
it would only produce 1 ore as usual. And if it was a city sitting on a brick or
wheat tile, it would earn two wheat or two brick, since there aren’t any corresponding
commodities cards for fields and quarries. Commodities go into your hand just like resources. They count towards your hand limit when a
7 is rolled and the robber is on the prowl. They can be traded between you and the other
players just like resources, they can be stolen by the robber, and you can discard them if
you need to thin out your hand after a 7 is rolled. You can get commodities in 2:1 port trades,
and both send and receive them in 3:1 port trades, or 4:1 trades with the supply. So if you had a settlement here, you could
trade 3 coins to get 1 sheep, or you could trade 3 brick to get 1 cloth. You could even trade 3 cloth to get 1 paper. It’s important to know that the raw cards
are called resources, and the refined cards are called commodities, because some of the
Progress cards that we’ll look at later specifically refer to either resources or
commodities. Since cities are so important in this game,
instead of starting off with two settlements, you start off with 1 settlement and 1 city. On your turn, you can spend your commodities
to upgrade your cities’ development in one of these three areas: trade, politics, and
science. The cost to move up to the first level is
1 of a particular commodity - 1 cloth, 1 coin, or 1 paper. Note that while the picture shows a pair of
coins, this still means 1 coin commodity card. When you pay the cost, you flip the page. Moving up to the next level will cost you
TWO commodities of that type, and so on. You can upgrade these tracks as many times
as you want and can afford to on your turn, barring a few restrictions that we’ll talk
about later on. Cities & Knights introduces a special event
die. On your turn, you’ll roll all 3 dice. If the event die shows a black ship, the barbarians
move one step closer to the island. Half of the 6 faces on the die are black ships,
so it’s a 50/50 chance that each roll will bring the barbarians closer. The other three faces are yellow, blue, or
green city icons, which map onto those trade, politics, and science sections of your development
chart. If one of those three symbols gets rolled,
you look at the number on the red die. If any player’s matching development section
includes the number on the red die, that player collects a progress card from the matching
stack, in turn order, going clockwise from the player who rolled the dice. These cards are kept secret, unless they have
victory points on them, in which case you immediately play them face up and keep them
separate from your other cards. Your hand of secret Progress cards - not including
the face-up victory points cards - is limited to 4. If you ever draw a fifth card, you have to
play a Progress card during your turn to get back down to your limit. If you draw a fifth card and it’s not your
turn, or if you fail to play a card on your turn, you have to return a progress card of
your choice from your hand to the bottom of its corresponding deck. So, these two players have both upgraded their
trade section, and when the dice are rolled, they land on the yellow trade symbol with
a 3 on the red die. This player doesn’t get anything, because
he’s only on the first upgrade page, which doesn’t include the 3-pip die. But this player has upgraded trade to the
next level, which includes the number 3, so she takes a yellow progress card from the
stack. So the more you develop your cities, the more
likely you are to be able to draw progress cards, because more red die numbers are included
on successive pages. I’ll do a rundown of what all the different
progress cards do later on. Next, you add the numbers on the two dice
together as usual, and everyone takes resources and/or commodities based on where their settlements
and cities are built. Just like rolling for resources and commodities,
when one player rolls the dice, all players stand to gain something, including Progress
cards, if they qualify. In the base game, there was a beginner rule
that said you had to finish all of your trading on your turn before building anything, but
in Cities & Knights, you can go back and forth between trading and building as much as you
like. There’s a new brick recipe available in
Cities & Knights. If you pay 2 brick, you can build a city wall. City walls can only go beneath cities - duh
- and each city wall you’ve built increases your hand limit by 2. That means that if you have a city wall and
a 7 is rolled to trigger the robber, you’re allowed to have 9 cards in your hand without
losing any. If you’ve got 2 city walls, you can hold
onto 11 cards, and if you build your third city wall, you can hang onto 13 cards. You only have 3 city wall pieces to place,
so you can’t build any more walls beyond that. And you can’t have a city with more than
one wall. It may not seem intuitive, but a city wall
does nothing to protect you from the barbarians. You know what? These barbarians have been making me nervous
this whole time… let’s look at what happens when they reach the shores of Catan. BARBARIANS ATTACK! When enough black ship symbols are rolled
on the event die across different players’ turns and the ship reaches the last space
on the track, the barbarians attack Catan. You count the number of cities on the island
- cities, not settlements - to figure out how strong the barbarians are. So 4 cities means the barbarians have a strength
of 4. Throughout the game, you’ll be building
and activating knights to protect the island. Basic knights have a strength of 1, strong
knights have a strength of 2, and mighty knights have a strength of 3. You add up the strengths of all the activated
knights on the island - doesn’t matter who owns them - and if that number is greater
than or equal to the strength of the barbarians, you and your opponents have safely defended
against the attack. If the combined strength of the activated
knights is less than the strength of the barbarians, the barbarians zero in on the player whose
activated knights have the lowest strength. That player gets one of his or her cities
sacked, and it gets downgraded to a settlement! If the city had a wall, the wall goes back
to the player’s supply. If any player has zero activated knights on
the board when the barbarians win an attack, that player is automatically targeted by the
barbarians. If two or more players are tied for the weakest
defense, all tied players lose one of their cities. Note that the weakest force is down to the
strength of the knights, not the number of knights. So this player has 3 activated knights, while
this player only has two. But the strength of these knights is 4, while
the strength of these ones is 5, so this player has the weaker defense, despite having more
knights on the board. Also note that only activated knights count
towards the defense of Catan. The knights are double-sided - one side is
grey, while the other side is very slightly yellow. It can be tough to figure out which side is
which, especially in low lighting, and i’m honestly surprised that this subtle difference
made it through so many redesigns of the game. Anyway, be very careful with your knights,
and make sure that the ones you think are activated are actually activated. If the barbarians are repelled by the Catan
neighbourhood watch, the player who contributed the most powerful activated knights - again,
not the MOST knights, but the highest combined strength of knightness - earns a Defender
of Catan card, which is worth 1 victory point. If two or more players tie for best defense,
nobody gets a Defender of Catan card. Instead, each tied player going clockwise
from the active player gets to grab one face-down progress card from any of the three stacks. In either case, win or lose, all the activated
knights on the board get flipped to their inactive side, and the barbarians get bounced
back to the beginning of the track, where they restart their long and menacing journey
towards Catan. If this is the first time the barbarians attack,
this lonely soul out in the desert starts getting some bad ideas in his head, and decides
to start ripping off the residents of Catan. So it’s only after the first barbarian attack
that the robber becomes active. Any time a 7 is rolled BEFORE the first barbarian
attack, players still lose cards if they’re over their hand limit, but the robber stays
put, and doesn’t steal anything from anyone. What’s more, players aren’t allowed to
control the robber using certain Progress cards or chasing him off with their knights
until the first barbarian attack happens. KNIGHTS The threat of losing one of your precious
cities to an impending barbarian attack is enough to make you want to learn how knights
work. On your development chart, there are a few
different knight-related recipes. The first one means you can pay a sheep and
an ore to train a basic knight and add it to the board. You have to put your new knight at one of
the unoccupied intersections along your roads, like you would with a settlement or a city...
but a knight doesn’t have to obey the 2-edges-away rule, so you can put your new knight here,
or here… but if it goes here, it blocks that space, so you wouldn’t be able to build
a settlement there unless and until you move the knight on a later turn. The good news is that knights also block your
opponents’ constructions. So if another player had built out to here,
that player can’t put a settlement or a knight there because your knight is in the
way. And the opponent can’t extend this road,
because your knight is blocking it. Your knights can also disrupt your opponents’
bid for the Longest Road card. If this player had built the Longest Road,
but you deploy a knight here, that’s now two different roads - a 1-segment road and
a 4-segment road - so that player loses the Longest Road card, and the two points that
go with it. You can pay 1 wheat to activate any of your
own knights. Flip the knight over to its slightly-yellow
side to show that he’s been eatin’ his Wheaties. Only activated knights contribute to the defense
of Catan when the barbarians attack. But if you feel you’ve got time to burn
before their next onslaught, there are three other things you can do with an activated
knight. First, you can flip your activated knight
to move him. A knight can move to any open intersection
along your road - so maybe from here, all the way down to here. But it can’t skip the track and hop over
to one of your separate, unconnected roads somewhere else on the island. Second, you can flip an activated knight to
displace another player’s knight. Your knight has to be stronger than the other
knight - so a strong knight can displace a basic knight, but a basic knight can’t displace
anyone. So if your strong knight here moves to this
spot where your opponent’s basic knight is posted, that ousted knight has to find
somewhere else along the road to move to. If there ISN’T anywhere the ousted knight
can go, that knight gets bounced right off the board! HYUH! I tol’ you not come ‘round my corner. The third thing you can do with an activated
knight is to scare the robber away. If you flip any of your activated knights
who are next to a tile where the robber is parked, you can move the robber to another
tile, and potentially steal a resource from any one player who has a settlement or city
bordering that tile. You can’t steal any Progress cards, but
you can steal a card from that player’s hand, which means you might randomly grab
one of that player’s commodity cards. Remember that the robber isn’t active until
after the barbarians’ first attack, so you can’t chase him away from a tile until that
happens. And unlike in the base game, you can’t use
a knight to chase away the robber before you roll the dice on your turn. Any knight you build starts on its inactive
side. You can activate a knight on the same turn
that you build him, but you can’t flip a knight to use his action on the same turn
that you activated him with delicious wheat. An activated knight can only perform an action
once per turn, but you can activate a knight, wait until a future turn, flip him to perform
an action, and feed him a wheat to reactivate him on that same turn, so that he’s ready
to use on a later turn. The last knight-related recipe is knight promotion. Spend a sheep and an ore to upgrade one of
the basic knights you have on the board to a strong knight. The knight stays in the same position during
the promotion, and if it was already activated, it stays activated. You can promote a knight in the same turn
that you built it, but you can only promote each of your knights once per turn. Keep in mind while you’re strategizing that
you only have two of each type of knight. And you won’t be able to upgrade your strong
knights to mighty knights until later in the game. METROPOLES So how do you get mighty knights? Well, it goes back to those city improvement
charts. If you upgrade to the third page in the trade,
politics, or science tracks, you earn a special ability. In the trade track, you get to trade commodities
- paper, coins, or cloth - at a 2:1 ratio. So on your turn, you can trade in 2 coins
for a brick, or 2 cloth for a paper. This ability doesn’t let you trade in resources
- it only counts when you pay out two of the same type of commodity. In the politics track, upgrading to level
3 grants you the ability to promote your strong knights to mighty knights. You can’t access your mighty knights until
you gain this ability. And in the science track, reaching level 3
means that any time the dice are rolled and your structures don’t produce any resources
or commodities, you get 1 of any resource you like... unless a 7 is rolled. Then you’re just boned like everybody else. These privileges persist if you upgrade past
level 3, by the way, even though the abilities aren’t written on the next two pages. If you’re the first player to upgrade to
level 4 of any given track, you get this special golden gate, which you can fit over any of
your cities. Put a matching token on your chart to mark
which branch the gate came from. A gate sweetens a city by 2 points - so the
city is already worth 2 points, and the gate is worth 2, so a city with a gate becomes
a 4-point metropolis! A metropolis counts as a city when determining
the strength of the barbarians during an attack, but the gate makes your city immune from the
barbarians! If you’re the player with the weakest defense
force, the barbarians can’t sack your metropolis. They CAN still sack one of your other, non-metropolis
cities though. And a metropolis owner can still be robbed
by the robber. There are three gate pieces in the game, one
for each of the three tracks. And just like the longest road card, another
player could potentially overtake you and steal your metropolis away. If someone reaches the fourth level of the
track where you have the metropolis gate, nothing happens. But if that player surpasses you to reach
the FIFTH level of a given track, that player claims the metropolis gate for that track. There go those two extra points. So if you want to secure your metropolis,
YOU have to be the first to upgrade to the fifth and final page of your chart, so that
no one can steal the gate from you. You can own more than one metropolis, but
it’s one gate per city. And you’re only allowed to upgrade a track
past level 3 if you have a city for that track. So if you only have 1 city on the board, you
can only upgrade one of these tracks past level 3. If you build up to a second city, you can
upgrade past level 3 in another track. And if you have 3 or more cities, you can
go past level 3 in all tracks. So how does losing a city affect your chart? Nothing changes, even if the barbarians sack
your last remaining city - you don’t lose any of your level 3 abilities, if you’ve
got ‘em, and you don’t start turning pages backwards. But if the barbarians bounce you back to the
stone age and all you’ve got left are settlements, you can no longer advance your chart. You have to have at least one city on the
board in order to pay commodities and flip those pages. A word to the wise: you do not want to lose
your last city in this game. It can be incredibly hard to bounce back from
that. PROGRESS CARDS On your turn, you can play as many progress
cards as you want after you roll the dice. Spent progress cards get sunk to the bottom
of their matching deck. You can’t trade Progress cards between players,
and they can’t be stolen by the robber. Only one card in the game - the green alchemist
- can be played before you roll the dice. That card lets you choose the numbers on both
dice before you roll the event die. One of the card types in the trade stack is
the merchant. Playing this card allows you to place the
purple merchant cone on a hex bordering one of your structures. Now you control the merchant, which means
that you - and only you - can trade that resource at a 2:1 ratio. So the merchant is like a land-locked 2:1
trade port. The merchant is also worth 1 point as long
as you control him. If another player plays a merchant card, that
player gets to move the merchant to another hex, which means you lose the point and the
2:1 trade bonus. Here’s a quick survey of the rest of the
Progress cards in the game: In the Trade stack, there’s a commercial
harbour card that forces other players to trade you one of their commodity cards for
whatever crummy card you offer them. The Master merchant card lets you look at
another player’s hand of resource and commodity cards, and steal 2 of them. The merchant fleet lets you pick one resource
or commodity, and use it to conduct as many 2:1 trades with the supply as you want to,
on this turn only, which is great if you have too many flippin’ sheep. The resource monopoly card is a nerfed version
of the monopoly card from the base game: name a resource (not a commodity) and everyone
has to give you 2 of those, if they’ve got em. The trade monopoly card does the same thing,
except it applies to commodities instead of resources. In the politics stack, you’ve got the bishop,
who lets you move the robber and steal a card at random from not just one, but ALL of the
players whose cities or settlements border that tile - but like i said earlier, you can
only play the bishop after the barbarians have attacked at least once. The constitution card gets you 1 victory point. The deserter forces another player to choose
one of his or her own knights to remove from the board, and then you get to put one of
your own knights of equal strength on the board. If you’re out of matching knights, you can
place one from a lower strength level. If your opponent turfs a mighty knight, you
get to place one of your mighty knights, even if you haven’t unlocked your mighty knights
by upgrading to level 3 of the politics track. The diplomat lets you remove a dangling road
- yours, or someone else’s. If you remove your own dangler, you can place
it somewhere else on the island. The intrigue card lets you displace an enemy
knight if it’s touching one of your roads. Then you’ve got the saboteur, who makes
players with more victory points than you lose half their commodity and/or resource
cards. The spy lets you peek at another player’s
Progress cards and steal one. You can’t steal any cards that have a victory
point on them, like the constitution card or a defender of Catan card. The warlord lets you activate all of your
knights for free. The wedding card forces everyone with more
points than you to give you a mix of two resource or commodity cards. Well, it beats a toaster. And finally in the science stack, there’s
the crane, which gives you a 1-commodity discount when you upgrade a city improvement track. The engineer gets you a free city wall. The inventor lets you switch two number tokens
on the board, as long as they’re not the low-probability 2 or 12, or the high-probability
6 or 8. The irrigation card gets you two extra wheat
for each field next to a city or settlement you control, and the mining card does the
same thing, but for mountains and ore. The medicine card lets you upgrade a settlement
to a city at a discount. The printer is worth a victory point, the
road building card gets you 2 free roads, and the smith lets you promote 2 knights for
free. ENDGAME The game ends when someone gets to 13 points
or more on his or her turn. Here’s a rundown of everything that gets
you points: Settlements - 1 point
Cities - 2 points Metropoles - 4 points
Controlling the merchant cone - 1 point Constitution and Printer cards - 1 point each
Defender of Catan card - 1 point Longest Road card - 2 points VARIANTS The rulebook mentions a couple of tweaks if
you want to make the game friendlier or nastier. On the friendly side, if you roll a 7 on either
of your first two turns, you can ignore it and re-roll. You can also skip rolling the event die during
everyone’s first two turns. This will make sure everyone gets a good head
of steam before all the robbing and pillaging starts. But if you like your Catan nasty, then when
the barbarians attack, you can let everyone decide which of their activated knights they
want to send into battle, going clockwise from the active player. This will potentially enable players to screw
over their opponents, whose cities would otherwise be protected by Catan’s military force,
so you can more deliberately cause people to lose their cities. This will definitely make the game longer,
though. SETUP Set up the game as you normally would, but
replace the development cards with the three Progress stacks. Add the three commodity card types to the
five resource types. Get rid of the Largest Army card and the original
recipe cards. Instead, give everyone a city improvement
chart and six knight tokens in their chosen colour, along with three city walls. Have the merchant cone and the metropolis
gates and tokens nearby at the ready. As with the base game, there’s a suggested
setup diagram in the rulebook for your first game, to ensure there’s no weird imbalance
of resources. When you place your first two structures,
instead of placing two settlements, everyone places a settlement in clockwise turn order,
and then a CITY going counterclockwise. Once that’s done, you collect resources
for any tile that your city touches - resources, not commodities. So this city would net the player a wood,
a wheat, and an ore to start off with. You won’t earn any commodities from your
city until the game begins in earnest. And now, you’re ready to play Catan: Cities
& Knights!
