What's your favorite expansion?

I'm partial to Cities & Knights and, in fact, find it difficult to get back into regular settlers now.  It's a great game, especially when combined with Seafarers.  I've also played the Settlers of the Stone Age game which I enjoyed quite a bit (I ended up giving it away though when I moved from California to minimize car space).

I've never understood the fascination with Cities & Knights. IIRC, that's the one where early in the game the pirates come and whoever is in last place loses a settlement. That just seemed awfully raw in a game where getting a slow start is already a double whammy because you're behind everyone in points and production.

Seafarers is okay, especially the way it rebalances the value of sheep, but my favorite spinoff is Starship Catan, the two player card game based on Starfarers of Catan. Much better than the Catan Card Game, IMHO.

I never played the Stone Age one. That came back after I'd tried to rein in my game spending, and at that point I figured I had plenty of Catan related stuff.

Yeah, if the barbs come too fast it can be rough.  You can make up house rules to soften the potential blow but it adds an element of urgency that the original settlers lacks.  It also opens up various pre-barb tactics (like building a 2nd city @ the last minute when three knights are active, you end up losing it but the other guys lost their only city & fall behind in city development).

Also, losing your city isn't also a death sentence, plenty of times I've come back from losing my city to win (not usually but it happens).

Have you tried the Traders & Barbarian one?  Thanks for joining, BTW!

Hello everyone!

The basic game is more luck based and that's why I prefer the C&K expansion. I use to play Catan (xplorers) regularly at asobrain.com. Unfortunetly the site is down for a few days at the moment. We could play some games when the site will work. My nickname there is Orson.

Yes, I'm hoping asobrain will be back up soon.

In the meantime though I've been playing on the Dutch site : http://www.xplorers.nl

(handle there is Narz also)

I haven't tried all the expansions and stand-alones, but my favorite so far is Die Siedler von Nürnberg.

My least favorite is the Settler's card game.  I thought it was way too slow.

Amy

I bought the settlers card game but I couldn't get into it either, eventually I think I just gave it away.