Reviewing EVERY Catan Expansion

you know this feeling of course you do it's catan i don't need to explain how to play it or whatever it's like the monopoly of our current generation a great job klaus and there's four big expansions we've been sent always vote and me being the reviewer who has played countless games of bass katan since high school reviewed tons of other board games between now and then immediately asked do these help the katana experience in 2022 for being 60 bucks each yeah maybe i'm crazy but i was just so curious about all these catons that i want to review every single one with scores and ranking later in the video and then there's going to be some thoughts about katan as a whole later so now let's get into it all seafarers is the easiest expansion to learn where you just have to learn how these new ships work which are like modified roads that go next to or solely on water then you go forth and seafarer to colonize new islands after building ships to connect them with the main island and get points for doing so that's basically it let's start talking about these ships where then being another type of road is sweet as you can spend a different amount of stuff to get it it's a little more expensive because sheep but these water roads can be moved that's right every single player can now on their turn move a ship so moving roads this allows for some new methods of competing on the longest road prize which now includes ships people can suddenly be moving ships to connect paths or block off opponents or just give up on the longest road the ships give a feeling of exploration aka actual seafaring as ships all branch out from the main island to drop humans on untainted smaller mini catan islands since settling one gives you two points and sometimes provide the gold mine hex which can give you any resource when rolled pretty much everyone is gunning for these which really changes the game a bit for how simple it is to learn super cool feeling to have a city on this gold mine then roll your number then choose to get two of any resource i mean these gold mines do make great targets for the robber but the robber isn't alone because now you can instead choose to move a pirate ship when it's time to move the robber which kind of blockades ships no landlubber normal sailors want to move in or out of that hex now so you can move the robber or move the pirate ship which is a good option because the pirate ship isn't necessarily the most powerful later in the game once people are set on having their ships down then you could play on different maps a lot of them since seafarers gives you so many water tiles and additional borders there's so many more ways to place hexes and then there's secret unknown scenarios where you clear the fog of war to colonize unknown places there's nothing really alarming with seafarers in the first scenario that we played but by looking ahead at the rest of the scenarios those don't seem too mechanically different so when we talk about issues it probably applies to all the scenarios here so first off the pacing in seafarers can run a little slower compared to base catan and that makes the overall time length run a little longer than base catan even though seafarers says it's still 60 minutes see you're going to be building more ships to explore the new islands and you're spending slightly more resources to do so because sheep but then these ships which are like roads don't really help your economy explicitly and they're going across water which is blue desert so this doesn't give you anything this hex doesn't give you anything exploring a new island is kind of like the feeling of getting largest army and catan too early and then not having the economy to keep increasing your victory points steadily this is because the main island is now weaker in output than base catan so you have to explore but ships cost slightly more resources across useless hexes just look at how much adjacency to water is going on losing you out on weighing more of the juicy intersections of 3 resource income per building the game is played to 14 points instead of 10-2 so again if you're not exploring you probably won't have enough points essential win anyways so build those ships still we would have liked to see the final vps win to be knocked down to 12 points and then only give one point for the second island you colonize and then there's the issue of being a gold digger this is a little queasy if its number gets rolled a lot yeah i know this definitely won't happen every game but it's super good because it's anything you want to fix your hand whereas normal spaces just give diminishing returns because you're always getting the same thing to keep this simple we would ask that they only give a range of three maybe even two types of resources but man having a hex that literally just gives you anything definitely bothers katan's core resource generation system and then early placement and initial roles are super important to get early colonizing or else someone can block you off from the best shipping routes and then you have to go all the way around if you're in this situation if you're looking for a first expansion this is one out of the two we recommend and is the simplest out of all the expansions but we here at shelf side are always looking for a little more complexity and just how to change the game so we have to delve into this one i consistently hear so much buzz about cities and nights cities and nights is a radical transformation to catan now everyone can build a unit called a knight which not only moves around the board to possibly block off other players but need to band together like everyone's knights spanning together to fend off barbarians aka invaders that come every so often to katan these get triggered by rolling the black ship on this die you now roll every single turn these invaders love cities so if everyone doesn't have enough combined knight strength equal to everyone's total cities well the player with the least knights loses a city oops that's gone if you do fend off the invaders the person with the most night strength gets one permanent point and then the actual cities of which you now start with one get overhauled as when they harvest stone sheep or wood they don't get the normal two resources they instead just get one of those cards and then one of these commodity cards oh man yeah so then the last thing you need to know is that these commodities can be spent to upgrade this flip chart that just tells you what to buy note how buying a knight is now a thing that just costs resources and you can even upgrade these nights when upgrading the flipbook you mostly get more chances to draw the new development cards off of the new die and then you get those cards any time that result is rolled it's like passive card income is a thing just like resource income right so let's start with the good first this injects a lot of novelty into catan with these new development cards where you take out the old deck and introduce three new decks now with how these dev cards are given off of dice rolls instead of buying them there's gonna be a lot more card play here and some of the abilities are super interesting there's old classics like monopoly that have been slightly tweaked a commodity version of monopoly for all the coin and paper cards and the road building is still the same there's cards that let you upgrade places over cheaper and the sneaky spy to look at another person's hand and take a development card of course there's no more night cards because now you just straight up by nights so now there's cards that let you upgrade your knights wake up all of them or probably the nastiest replace an opponent knight with yours since you're also getting development cards off of upgrading your flip sheet the more you upgrade the more development card income you have for a new type of progression and there's more card play because your dev card hand is capped at three so you gotta spend them there's also pretty good competition from developing the flips where upgrading a section enough grants a metropolis but then a metropolis can get stolen from you if someone goes on the tier higher than you on the sheet this is the game's replacement for the largest army tile but now there's three sections to upgrade and you're probably going to be competing at least one of them every game because the extra development card income is good but we have to talk about the knights the actual unit you now have moving around the board you can get creative with them disrupting opponents building possibilities or even have a consistent way to chase off the robber but then there are also lazy bums who exhaust after defending against the invaders and exhaust after moving meaning that you always have to be careful about grain management now because you gotta feed them you especially gotta be vigilant when the invaders start getting closer adding urgency to katan with a ticking bomb element as there's a 50 chance that the invaders advance every turn so you now got to spend resources with a new relation to time so your knights are ready but at the same time when your group fails to defend by not having enough night strength invaders only punish the person with the least knights so then if you're not last in army size maybe you only need one night and can focus on your economy this makes facing the invasion a decision to either build up the best army to get a point from successfully defending and being a hero or be a weaker army hoping that the largest army guy continues to maintain his army so you can focus on other things plus really cool how you have to carefully evaluate city building now since if anyone builds a city that's more cities so that means stronger invaders remember every turn this could move up so this forced alliance between the players leaves us some pretty cool deal making potential in catan if the guy with the most victory points is going to successfully defend well you can just give resources to someone else to fund their army so that they can be the mighty defender of katan and prevent the winner from getting points or let's say that orange over here has the most points but a tiny army so then maybe you just gang up with the other katan players to just intentionally fail the invasion so that this person who's in the lead but doesn't have an army loses a city and then when you factor in this development card to replace an opponent's knight with yours you can blackmail people into trading with you and this all has a level of repeating urgency they keep coming those barbarians keep coming to the island but unfortunately cities and nights with its bold changes does have some glaring issues first it really needs a player aid for all the new mechanics it's introducing where knight activation and movement really needs to be clarified on a separate sheet and also how gaining a metropolis works how come there's no scoring tile for that the back of the rulebook has a little turn sequence box that really helps and a streamlined version of this could have been given to each player actually this just goes into how cities knights is just visually hard to follow where you just can't see what tier of upgrades people have on their flipbook from afar which really matters if you're trying to beat the upgrade for a metropolis which is a four point swing plus the knights which are one of the most important parts here are insanely hard to see if you don't play under studio lights yeah the active side is light tan and the inactive is black and white like from far away who knows the difference this causes so much confusion with the round around invaders oh i flipped it over uh wait is it active okay with the lights back on let's get back to your hand and the commodities look so similar to their normal resource counterpart in the hand look at the background similarity speaking of these commodities all the additional hardplane cities and nights just makes card handling fiddly commodities just sit in your hand for a long time being saved up as it can only be spent for one thing which is upgrading your flip sheet to make it a little worse you can just build city walls to increase your hand capacity by two so that encourages even more fiddly hands okay but having more hands like this is just the card route that cities and knights wanted to take and if you do have card holders that can definitely alleviate that issue okay but now let's get into the gameplay issues starting with the flip sheet so once you hit tier 4 when you upgrade this thing as you can see there's an ability you get when you upgrade it i'll show it on screen this one is really good where you always get a resource every turn as long as you don't roll a seven this is super strong compared to the other ones you can get here where one is you can trade for a two to one good but not as busted and then the last one is you can upgrade your knights to tier three which yeah it's kind of whatever compared to getting a resource every single turn next thing you can probably already tell this is nothing like normal katan feel and its length is actually bloated past a 90 minutes listed on the box most of the time cities nights is more like 2-3 hours especially on your first couple playthroughs this is because not only do turns take longer with more to think about but the game length is just padded out with so many of the tweaks like if someone loses a city to invaders they're really behind which slows down their economy so if they're gonna win the game it's just gonna take longer or let's talk about cities where they're actually nerfed where instead of always giving two resources three out of the five hexes they're next two only give one resource and then the commodity that is only spendable in one area this slows down spending power across the game especially if you want to build cities with three stone but you have to be careful about building cities because that makes the invaders stronger so double whammy for slowing down the game to make it all worse cities nights is filled with resource sinks areas you spend resources on without really advancing the game like how about the city walls that lets you have a bigger hand which while allowing for new feelings of resource accumulation this adds more time to the game as you just spent too break to play defensively the worst culprit for spending resources is to prevent the invaders from doing damage see while you can play around with having the smallest army you probably don't want zero knights since that puts you at a huge risk for losing a city if the invasion fails but everyone else has just one night so then everyone is buying at least some knights plus every time you face invaders regardless of outcome all the knights are exhausted because they're lazy bombs so that's a lot of wheat that your group needs to spend to keep reviving them a lot of stuff that would normally go into making people's economies better to steadily advance the board goes into big army yeah to every so often have one person get the victory point for a game where you need 13 points to win remember there's no more largest army card so no more sudden point swings from just stacking a night card you never had to keep feeding if you're the type of person to play katan in 30 to 45 minutes then maybe this could be 90 minutes once you get it down but come on first games can take more than 3 hours which is saying a lot for katan maybe 11 victory points is more of a realistic any point those are the glaring issues now we're going to talk about some nitpicks that depending on how you approach katan might not be an issue for you cities and knights has some areas where the randomness is not handled healthfully so first off you really really need a sheep and a stone early on to build a knight for the first invader attack otherwise losing a city within the first couple rounds basically knocks you out of winning the game there is a variance where you don't roll the event diet during the first two rounds the event die that triggers a ship and we're surprised why that isn't in the initial game and you know how we praised the increased development card play before well they got an ugly side since there's a chance that players get cards every time you roll a die the card income could start to get pretty good in mid late game as people upgrade their flip chart which they will because it's the only thing you can spend commodities for and gives you a metropolis at some point and the income is solely based off of the red dye and the new event eye so two out of the three dice you roll every turn it's entirely possible you don't see many development cards or a staggering amount in some games if you keep getting outcomes like this the new cards have some pretty crazy new abilities that are not balanced like replacing someone's knight with your own is a huge swing especially if done for a tier two knight like can you imagine someone playing this deserter card on you then making you lose your only knight then the invaders attack the island fails to defend so then you lose your city as well sheesh yeah there's no counter play to that if it's outside of your turn or then there's this car to literally swap numbers on the board which is game changing especially if drawn super early so actually the cool thing about cities and nights here is that there are three decks people are drawing from so if you memorize the cards in each of the decks you can anticipate what could happen if people draw cards from decks but this still doesn't mean they're balanced and or funds have sprung on you if you would get a little ticked at someone playing monopoly in base catan or even something like road building then yeah all this take that from cities and knights is not up your alley but hey some people do like all that and it technically is more player interactive and so we'll get back to you cities and knights in scoring but now let's get on to the next one traders and barbarians traders and barbarians is an entirely new direction with modules this is five easily digestible tweaks to bass katan with four smaller variants that can get mixed into any type of catan you're playing these smaller modules can be really simple like written rules that you cannot robber weaker players but that is just a written role in here and you can do that without this expansion so let's get on to the other modules that are in all the components you get in this expansion there's the harbormaster a new largest blank thing to fight over which gives 2vp for settling a lot in harbors and now you play to 11 points this is an alright edition where it technically adds a streamlined way to get more points but can make the game feel less tight as people can double down on where they're already doing well to close out the game or then there's the event deck because if you hate dice this replaces it whoa no more weird games like constantly rolling nines in a row and then six only once a game what the actual heck you reset off this new year card so you can't count the cards here it also hilariously introduces some other randomness through events tied to these card flips and so when you read a card every turn that can be a bit fiddly and make the game feel like a party mode with random events it's not anything too extreme just silly stuff like slowing down road building through an earthquake or you pass cards to the left to the left oh and there's flips that slightly benefit whoever has the longest road and whoever has the largest army and then there's a 2p variant we haven't tried i mean there is rivals of katan for 2p katan but hey i mean cool thing to have any katana expansion be 2p now we got to try two of the full-fledged modules here because that's the meat of this expansion that's why we're here and we'll get to this one in a bit but before that it smells like fish it's time for the fishermen of catan basically this is introducing a new type of spendable thing called fish where you draw them face down off of rolls from being adjacent to fish places on the board that desert that didn't do anything is now an awesome bearing fish pond you'll hide your fish tokens from others and you have between 1-3 on them and then you can spend them to steal from people get resources from the bank or even build stuff then you play to 12 points to win these are great since you end up just having a good amount of more options every turn where they're like a resource that don't clog up the hand and are hidden for some mind games you now have an extra choice of spending for more stuff right now or you use them for a big turn later after spending your normal resources plus building stuff is now a little more nuanced as settling next to the lake or the harbors is now better than before there's only one real problem which is a weird fish income rule that is if you roll the dice and there's not enough face down fish to fulfill everyone's production for that turn no one gets fish this can be really wonky because you can have a lot of rolls where two people should be getting fish but they can't so no one gets fish then the fish income can totally stagnate and it's like you're not even playing with that much of the expansion anymore we were okay with totally taking out this rule and just having fish production not be limited but you could play around with randomly rolling the dice to see who gets the fish if it's split between two players or three players or you could have the fish just reset on their own if there's one turn of no one being able to get fish and then there's some component issues of the fish tokens not feeling great and looking like an afterthought in visual design or the nitpick how in four player games the one person who is left out of the lake will probably robber all the time because it's just a good destination but these are whatever so let's move on to the actual traders and barbarians yep this is the real deal this module is literally called traders and barbarians and it is a little weird okay scratch that it's weird it introduces wagons to the game see you play as fedex where you pick up tokens from one of the edge hexes and then drop off tokens into another to do that you move wagons after you finish your normal turn where they can move slowly across the map but then if they move on a road they can move faster if that road happens to be one of your opponents they still move faster but you have to pay them money we'll talk about that in a bit if they move through a barbarian in the way it really slows down your wagon's movement you get one victory point and some money when you complete an amazon prime drop-off and money is great because you can spend two of them to become any resource in the game last thing you replace the development deck with this dev deck of four cards mostly knights some hidden vp road building and move your wagon faster okay so now the cool things about this weird variant so you really have this feeling of being able to do something every turn because regardless of the die roll or your resources in hand you can always always move your wagon see what happened there it moved across roads and moving across roads basically makes your wagon move twice as fast so all road building is super important in traders and barbarians it's still katan rules where roads are permanent it's just that there's no longer this longest road victory tile but you're still placing roads like crazy because you want to be able to block off your opponents and make them pay you there's no more robber too just three barbarians who stand in the middle of routes and so when you roll a seven it's a quick intuitive change of not blockading players hexes but blockading their routes you can even use your wagon to kick out barbarians to make you think about wagon positioning even more the wagon is basically everything about this variant and upgrading it to move like crazy is extremely satisfying paired with how you get more money for each drop-off this gives you a second economy in the game on top of doing the normal katan thing of rolling dice for resources playing this module is a smooth trade-off between upgrading your wagon or building roads or just doing your normal katan things plus being able to trade money is pretty cool like you can always throw some money in with a card to trade with someone else if you don't want to quite trade away two cards like the only bad things we could think about for traders and barbarians is that the wagons can kind of look like the cities from before and that you'll need a couple more plastic bags to fit all the stuff you get in this box so this is kind of whatever stuff but going back to this module though this guy here this traders and barbarians module this really does not feel like katan at all this module right here is just the weirdest katana experience we've ever had even after playing all the expansions since the faster you pick up and deliver with your wagon the more points you get creating actual cities and settlements takes a bit of a backseat is pick up and deliver for you in this pseudo-katan system where you're building roads for everyone's wagon not for buildings hey nice and again they took out longest road the way to get points there but you're still building a lot of roads we didn't get to try the other three modules the rivers of catan the caravans and barbarian attack which all have increasing complexity and ideas to end in the traders and barbarian scenario so good thing we talked about that rivers of catan has money introduced and you're building bridges on rivers to connect hexes the caravans has bidding to place neutral camels that give more points to your buildings and help count for your longest road and then barbarian attack has well barbarians attacking after every time you build a settlement or city these barbarians can even conquer hexes then you can fight them off through hiring knights man if only we had more time to try these out so many games to play so that is it for traders and barbarians now let's get to the last expansion box explorers and pirates the fourth and last katan expansion this is all about exploring on a bigger map as you buy ships no no not the sea fare ships that are basically roads 2.0 no these are proper ships that sail across the seven or one seas like really you move each of your ships every turn sailing the seas to discover new lands to drop off settlers you have loaded onto the ships oh and then you may find pirates you need to fight off with crews of fighters on your ships also when you don't get resources on a roll during someone's turn you automatically get one gold and if you ever spend two gold they become any resource you want yeah very similar to traders and barbarians gold basically you get something every single turn unless someone rolls a 7 then no one gets anything for that term to solidify this as being the most laid-back expansion of all you take out every single development card and bonus scoring tiles yep focus on the ships okay the title explorers and pirates checks out first explore where building mostly on the new islands is the main way to get points then the pirates where you can have a scenario that gives points by discovering and killing the pirates with hired soldiers maybe you'll do this so much you'll become the greatest pirate scourge for an extra point good thing about this more relaxed caton well it has the best wooden pieces out of all of the katan expansions you got soldiers settlers and different ships and some of them are meant to be on the ships settlers and crew members even go onto the harbors which are the chunkier replacement for cities that were also removed in this expansion yep bye-bye to resource generator building but you still use the harbors because they're the only way to build ships that sounds like gameplay pros so explorers and pirates definitely gives the most feeling of adventure where it feels super thematic to be building settlers to load them onto ships and then sail them out into the middle of nowhere and see what lands they explore and maybe you'll even get water so the distant islands will look different every game i mean heck you can even have two smaller islands where you thought there was one bigger one it's definitely a fitting story to sail forth make a settlement far away and then eventually upgrade that into a harbor to build ships on that far away land using it as a beachhead to explore more locations land ho oh that's water freaking a with all the water and sailing roads definitely take a back seat where positioning ships is very important throughout the game so moving multiple ships whether it's to explore pick up or deliver things is another step in every turn plus you can have a sudden boost in ship movement by spinning wool and you don't need roads to build settlements so it's very possible to do sneaky plays like this this was a very dirty play that was done to me in a game and i commend it knocks me out of the game dude okay that's just a dick move it makes sense yeah one two three four wow you dick wad last cool thing is that this runs extremely true to time that is in the first scenario that gets us to the second scenario you'll see in this book where it introduces pirates as a mechanic and that runs too long see this second scenario throws in almost all the new tricks and so let's start with players hiring their own pirate ships yeah they're called pirate ships when they roll a seven which are like a robber of the seas that prevent ship movement these pirate ships start to pose a problem to the game length where to get past an opponent's darn pirate you have to spend money to the bank to get rid of an enemy pirate you have to roll a six with an unmoved ship and while you can roll more dice if you add more ships around that pirates that's still a six you have to roll movement can just become agonizing when multiple enemy pirates hold choke points and you just don't have money you only move your pirate ship when you roll a 7-2 and there's no night card so be warned of weird player pirate game states then you have to play to 12 points in the scenario which is a steeper ask for a game where development cards and scoring tiles are taken out and everyone has an additional phase of their turn of moving ships to get extra points you want to find and kill pirates but if the pirates are far away the game will be longer and pirates slow down settling because you can't settle next to pirates unless you kill them first so doing that requires buying soldiers and putting them on ships which cost resources and you got to sail across the water multiple times the game can especially hit a wonky space once you've killed all the pirates but no one has won yet meaning that crews are entirely useless but it appears this gets fixed in later scenarios 10 points is definitely more of a fitting timeline to get this to the box projection of one hour and then what the heck is going on with some of the printing it's entirely cut off ah are you serious this isn't in the other expansions and the whole idea of this is loading your ships but then some of the pieces will fall off your ships mid-game and that's just how this was made with flat wood okay this next point is a lot more cautionary and really dependent on how you approach katan in general see explorers and pirates duels the player interaction of guitar first off this map is about twice as big as bass katan so you're not really competing for spaces as much especially with relation to road building because you can just sail around places now and then everyone has gold to spend to get any resource they want so that diminishes trading incentives by a little and then number two well the game took out the development cards or the mind games and then also the scoring tiles for the point swings there's definitely still trading or working together to defeat pirates or rushing to explore somewhere before someone else does but it's not as much player interaction as bass guitar and definitely doesn't feel as mean which could be a good thing for some players this is the only way to play katan without ever losing victory points which again is a really cool thing for some groups the last nitpick is that this expansion is just the most annoying to organize out of the four with no included insert and just has the most mapped tiles because it introduces a much bigger map for a slightly longer setup time than the rest the big thing to get out of explorers and pirates is that it is the most friendly feeling overall where you get something every turn no matter what the dive role is because money and it just wants you to revel in the feeling of exploring new areas it is also entirely pick up and deliver oriented by picking up things and sailing them somewhere else so let's talk about the rest of this expansion that we haven't tried but have read through that have even more pick up and deliver so there's a fish scenario where in addition to pirates you can also find fish areas where you have a chance to pick up fish from and deliver to this special island for points then the last scenario is all about spices where you can pick up crew members on islands in exchange for spices which you also need to drop off and these also give you permanent abilities like making your ship faster now it's time for score [Music] so here at shelf side when we're scoring expansions we're critically evaluating the aforementioned pros and cons and then also adding in the caveat of are these expansions a good idea in the first place to add to the base katana experience bass guitar would be a 7 out of 10 recommender score it is good this has a lot of game mechanics presented in a streamline friendly way from hand management trading competing over public goals hex counter play and looks very visually sharp a big x factor for the game is just how accessible is and that is also because of how relevant it is in modern culture so it's kind of cheating compared to most games that exist in this sense but hey board games are a social thing and accessibility really matters katan's biggest problem is its huge dependence on initial building placement which matters a lot for a game that can run up to an hour if you watch tournament vlogs they keep talking about initial placement it's kind of hilarious how much it matters this initial placement issue ends up aggravating the sole reliance on dice rolling to get things so with that in mind about bass guitar let's get it out of the way and talk about these bad boys disclaimer for this video we couldn't play as much of these as we normally do but definitely felt like we got the gist of each but they're mostly two plays of each if something remarkably good or bad comes up the unplayed scenarios then screw me that would definitely change the scores which i currently firmly stand by there's just so many games to play uh so seafarers is going to be a 6 out of 10 above average cities and nights four out of 10 below average traders and barbarians 7 out of 10 good explorers and pirates 6 out of 10 above average okay some of these were really hard to give out because parts of some of these expansions don't really feel like expansions but like an entirely new game especially once you start putting in pick up and deliver mechanics in into catan but hey those are the scores i'm not chickening out cities and knights really stood out like a sore thumb while making this review this giant review thing so let's start here you know cities and nights is the expansion that has about 10 pages of rules to go through before you start playing instead of three to six like the rest and this was almost a 3 out of 10 a bad score for how long it is but we eventually got it to around 2 hours which is more reasonable and it would actually be a 5 out of 10 average if it wasn't so god awful to keep track of the game state while playing but anyways cities and knights has a lot of bold ideas that feel like they're stretching katan's core ideas too hard like there's more to do with wackier source of income and the actual wooden knights proves to be a mandatory resource sync the player interaction from said knights is clever but consequences from invaders can be too punishing early on and remember how we said katan's issue was that the initial placement matters too much well citizen knights aggravates that issue in two ways where one you really need early income to get your development card engine going and your night defenses up and then two it being a longer game means that poor initial placement leaves you practically removed out of winning contention for a longer time see cities unites is so weird because it feels catered towards more studious hardcore players that would be more careful with this initial placement and maybe enjoy more cutthroatness and overall complexity like tanking your own points for a good saboteur play is the nastiness and point manipulation you never see in bass catan but at the same time cities and knights handles randomness worse than base with another d6 roll every turn and these development cards feeling zany at times so efforts to play well aren't necessarily rewarded as much cities and nights is not overall bad per se it's not bad there's nothing definitely broken about it besides the visuals and we do really respect it for how it creatively tweaks the cities at night it's just that in 2022 it's a tough sell see if we were making this review back around 1998 when this game came out so like 24 years ago then this score might have been a six or a seven but then hey youtube didn't even exist back then so this video would not exist this review would not exist today if you're playing catan you're probably playing it for simplicity and casualness like i kid you not when doing research for this video and talking to friends i consistently heard stories of people not finishing cities and nights this inconvenient cities tonight's truth goes to show that a how hungry the resource sinks are and b all the added complexity and the true time length isn't for the vast majority of katan players we'll get a little bit back to this at the end but if you're really looking for something more meaty compared to bass guitar and like the semi-co-op invader mechanic well then maybe these games are more up your alley or you can check out the other katana expansions like we're gonna go to now if you're getting your first expansion we recommend either seafarers or traders and barbarians these would have been the same score a 7 out of 10 if seafarers was cheaper because it being 60 dollars like the rest of the expansions for not adding too much to the overall katana experience knocks it down a little bit anyways seafarers is a lot more straightforward and easy to learn but that is also how vanilla and basic it is compared to the other expansions so if you're feeling more adventurous traders and barbarians is much better bang for buck heck scratch that it's the best bang for buck out of any of the expansions its first module is a nice incremental step and there's plenty of smaller modules to mix into katan as you play then for its weirdness that we tried the last scenario is katan amazon delivery edition which is so strange on how you view roads if i had to guess traders and barbarians probably doesn't get that much appreciation because it came late in catan cycle at 2007 when the type of katan fans who would really look into expansions probably moved on to other games and or stuck with the first two expansions after all remember each expansion is 60 bucks so don't blame them also it's pretty confusing to even tell what traders and barbarians is because it has such a mish-mash identity it just throws in five pretty unrelated scenarios some of which are so different from base catan it's hard to say they would be all as guaranteed as a hit as seafarers gentle additions this finale explorers and pirates is a return back to exploring but way more so than seafarers where you have way more buying options to explore with and then these outside tiles are random on a much much bigger board it makes catan feel like katan age of discovery edition where you feel like columbus loading up ships on the mainland and sailing it out to a far away sea to fight pirates i mean are they really pirates if we're going to their place and killing them whatever it's the most ideal screw around katan for those wanting a little more mechanics where you can always get something every turn so that feels good and there's just more to spend on so if you thought katong gameplay was cool but irritating because of poor rolls or too much meanness this can be for you this is a very fitting final installment too because you can see the little bits of dna from the previous expansions you got the exploration with some ships in seafarers and then banding together to defeat a common enemy in cities and nights and then the pickup and deliver with money introduced to the game with traders and barbarians plus explorers and pirates being so overall lacks makes it the most easily house rule to play with two players to just chill out and explore on a quiet night in but we haven't tested that oh and then warning that explorers is a little weird and that nothing mixes here with other expansions so it's really an exclusive expansion to play with and then if you do pick it up please feel free to house rule it to reduce the point threshold in the scenarios okay so i gave overall scores out to these guys but do note that none of these really solve our core issues with katan itself which would just involve making the game shorter and then finding some way to fix the resource income which i mean now that i i'm saying it out loud that would really not feel like it's on it would probably not sell well anyways but extra cool that each of these expansions does have pretty nice strains so let's have a bonus round of rankings let's let's cut to it bottom will be the last place top will be the first place the best place okay so if you really don't play a lot of games outside of catan and are looking for our first expansion here we go seafarers wins if you fall more into mibo and are looking for something to spice up your katana experiences with friends and family well here we go traders and barbarians you win if you wanted to feel the weirdest and least katan-like traitors still wins the roads in the last scenario is just so weird and then if you are in love with katan's core systems so much that you want a more complicated game on top of that with more length more interaction more meanness and more random resource generation and variance of card abilities with a group of three or four that shares that mentality with you then yeah cities and heights is for you there is an audience for this game just a very niche one in 2022. now it's time for my personal score time how i feel about all these expansions so it's been quite the katan journey for me i used to quite like this game then got burnt out of it in high school then slowly came back to grasps with it and then just when you think you're still probably not going to play it again because there's so many other great games out there katan studios dragged me back in uh oh let's play katan seriously really awesome that i could get this experience and share it with you guys so here are my scores and i even got to replay bass katan again after playing some of these expansions so bass guitar is going to be a 6 out of 10 for me seafarers is going to be a 6 out of 10 for me cities and knights a 2 out of 10 for me traders and barbarians a 7 out of 10 and then explorers and pirates a 4 out of 10. let's just start with cities and knights i really don't think a lot of its mechanics are that fun to play with they nerfed cities which feels extremely unsatisfying to me i hate having all the commodities in my hand and i really dislike how drawing development cards is strictly tied to dice rolls the game just feels really fiddly to me and i just can't really see what's going on with the knights and other flipbooks either i just don't think katan's core system of dice rolling for resources benefits from the resource sinks of knights and then fending off a completely rng advanced enemy with completely rng development card draws if i'm gonna be building units and moving around and upgrading a society i would rather play something else especially for two and a half hours getting to end game of cities and nights feels like an absolute slog as the resource thinks everywhere just keeps slowing down the game as for seafarers it feels slightly above bass guitar and enjoyment but still a 6 out of 10. the marginally cool additions of the ships and settling new islands is offset by making the game slightly longer then traitors and barbarians really surprised me where it got boosted to a 7 out of 10 from a 6 out of 10 from the fishermen and the harbormaster which i found really clean additions to the simple formula of katan i didn't really take too competitively anyways just having another thing to gather off of die rolls and so more things to spend feels like to me a boost the best parts of katan just getting stuff and spending stuff the harbor master also feels good probably because i don't prioritize harbors enough anyways so it's a double win for me there even though i don't think it's too sound of a mechanic overall the actual traitors in barbarian scenario is hilariously weird with constantly pumping your wagon and blocking off enemies and so there's a lot of player interaction but something about how the wagons are moving around in a catan board it's a little funky but not enough to lower my overall score here the kind of weird one for me still is this explorers of pirates which feels a little too much like meandering around with too much of an exploration focus when i play this i feel like i'm getting weirdly teased some civilization building game with aspects from it with exploring getting a better economy building ships and armies and fighting pirates but i feel like those systems don't work well with katan and they really could be without this game being knocked on and probably just appealing to an entirely different audience man after playing catan systems dozens and dozens of times by now i really am of the opinion that its strengths are in how social accessible and streamlined it is and then so adding more stuff through expansions is not necessarily helping that many of my non-board gamer friends love the trading and building progression of katan while i really enjoy those too but find the largest army longest road conflict to be the most engaging the moment katon starts replacing longest road and largest army or adds more parts to turns or more types of spendable cards and or does anything to add considerable timeline it starts creeping into other categories of games that i already have solid picks for in 2022 basically what i'm trying to say is that no expansion blew me away and was a must-have for the pseudo-party itch that katon fills for me to hang out with new people or non-board gaming friends the simpler expansions win out this was a crazy video to make so much katan i've been playing so if you could subscribe and like the video that really helped me out and once again thanks to katan studios for sending me all this stuff all this stuff and that's a not effect scoring and then we got our patrons to think and then i'll probably cut to some footage of us playing guitar while we roll the patron stuff roll the patron stuff patreon.comside roll all that stuff one of these days i'm gonna run around oh you're nights oh wait wait i'm running around with a juggernaut interesting dude i got a lot of these i thought you can't do anything i'm a little chair yeah i just make up the most of you yeah actually semi-close i'm about 10. this gives me 12 and that completes 13. why does that give you small this biggest army oh so close that's so close yeah i was really close and i just need to build something 30 from where deliver wait no you're not you're living here why am i moving there what the

Channel: Shelfside

Views: 293,649

Keywords: tabletop, shut up and sit down, dice tower, boardgamegeek, geek and sundry, no pun included, watch it played, prozd board game, dicebreaker, settlers of catan, rahdo runs through, actualol, jongetsgames, 3 minute board games, tom vasel, before you play, quackalope, boardgameco, man vs meeple, no rolls barred, good time society, catan expansions explained, catan seafarers, catan cities and knights, catan pirates and explorers, catan traders and barbarians, catan expansions ranked

Id: bSVdYQFzFSs

Length: 45min 10sec (2710 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 03 2022