At a later point, you might want to enrich your game experience. The blue “Seafarers” Expansion add ships and the exploration in the sea to the gameplay. Again: If you buy the regular box, you’re good to go with 3-4 players. If you want to play with 5-6 players, also get the smaller blue box. — At this point, you might have four game boxes (big red, small red, big blue, small blue), and you can play “The Settlers of Catan” together with “Seafarers” with up to 5-6 players.

Another Expansion would be “Cities & Knights” in the green box – it will give you more achievements to be built on the regular island, more resources – in short a lot of more game tactics to be tried out with 3-4 players. To play with 5-6 players, add the smaller green box as well.

You can combine “Seafarers” with “Cities & Knights”, but you don’t have to. You must start with the Basic Game in the red box, but you could go either way to “Seafarers” or “Cities & Knights” first and add the other one later. You can of course combine the Basic Game with both expansions and extensions for 5-6 players, leading you to six game boxes (big red, small red, big blue, small blue, big green, small green).

The third expansion is called “Traders & Barbarians” and it comes in purple box — again, to be added to the Basic Game. It contains various variants and scenarios. It is the third Expansion we made, but you can of course start with this in addition to the Basic Game. Again: Big box for 3-4 players, for 5-6 player add the small box as well. You can start with the Basic Game and add “Traders & Barbarians” first, and continue later with “Seafarers” and/or “Cities & Knights” — or in any other order you like. You can combine all Expansions with each other, find our more about this on above mentioned web page.

… Finally, you might end up with 8 boxes, both big and small ones in red, blue, green, and purple. But again: The first step would be to buy the big red box “Basic Game” and start to play with 3-4 players.

Very interesting progression of Catan games. Its neat to see how these things we enjoy so much come to be.

We have spent a lot of money on the all of the board game expansions (including the 5-6 player expansions) and all well worth it! Sadly though, my wife plays the board game very little. Although she does not join in the games, she does enjoy hosting Catan game nights at our home, and finds them to be lively and entertaining as some of us take our Cataning very seriously…

Recently, I purchased the Catan card game and to my delight, she now plays with me! This is her kind of game, and when we don’t have a group to play… its now my kind of game as well.

Are there any updates on the Princes of Catan game? I am considering purchasing the Catan card game expansion, but will consider waiting if the new one is to be released soon.

Thanks for making the various Catan games so enjoyable…I wish I could convey how much fun it has made for us personally.

Brian R

For the record, my wife has always loved the card game more, exactly for the intrigue, detail, etc. you blog about in these card game posts. So: thanks for helping me see the light. (And a year of plenty!)

Kudos also posted on my blog: http://dmandle.wordpress.com/2010/01/30/settling-catan/