Catan: Cities and Knights vs The Collective
Catan: Cities & Knights is an expansion to Klaus Teuber’s Catan, originally published by Kosmos in Germany and distributed in English by Catan Studio. You can play on tabletop or online, and the target audience is hobby board gamers who already love base Catan and want more decisions per turn and more complexity. I picked it as a comparator for my team’s game, The Collective, a hidden-role social deduction game built on a coin economy where two capitalists hide among four socialists and fight to pass policies through a private auction. Both games live or die by their economy systems, and the expansion’s design philosophy is fundamentally about giving players more lanes to stay in contention. That is exactly the philosophy The Collective needs to absorb if our economy is going to support the hidden-role layer underneath it. Teuber’s Catan expansion feels like a designer who looked at base Catan’s dynamics, identified where the aesthetic collapsed into frustration, and engineered new mechanics to repair it.
Take Progress Cards. Upgrading a city on the paper, cloth, or coin track increases your odds of drawing a Progress Card when the corresponding event die rolls. The dynamic this produces is a tension between specialization and hedging. A friend who has played for years told me the dominant strategy is to upgrade all three tracks to level one before pushing any single track higher, because probability compounds. I tried this and like 8-9 turns in I was sitting on three Progress Cards while my sister, who had committed entirely to paper, had drawn one. I pulled a Spy card off the coin track that let me peek at her hand and steal a Progress Card she was holding, the kind of swing base Catan’s Development Cards never produce. With roughly twenty-five different effects, you genuinely don’t know what tools you’ll have access to in three turns. Variance, when bounded by an investment the player chose, feels like opportunity rather than luck. The Collective could learn from this. Our policies right now are a flat deck, but layering rare high-impact cards behind earned economic positions would give socialists and capitalists reasons to spend strategically.
The City Wall mechanic is an example of the expansion’s anti-frustration philosophy. In base Catan, rolling a seven when you hold more than seven cards forces you to discard half. My sister nearly rage-quit a base game after this happened to her four times in one session. Cities & Knights solves this by letting you spend two brick on a Wall that raises your hand limit to nine. Because of PTSD from regular catan games I rushed a Wall before doing almost anything else, and when a seven did roll early-game while I was holding nine cards, I just shrugged and kept playing. This is the kind of negative feedback loop the MDA paper warns about in its Monopoly example, where dramatic tension collapses. Walls let you spend your way out of the punishment, converting a small investment into emotional safety.
The contrast with The Collective is direct though. Our six-coin penalty policy ended a capitalist’s game in ten minutes in the playtest last class. This is the same failure mode as a first-invasion city sack in Cities & Knights, except we have no Knight equivalent. Cities & Knights protects against every painful mechanic through layered redundancy, and the buffer is always purchasable with a small investment.
The important lesson is how precisely Teuber tuned the costs against payoff. A Wall costs two brick and saves five or six cards. A basic Knight costs one wheat and one sheep, cheap enough that skipping it before the first barbarian is malpractice. Later in the game I had to choose between upgrading paper to level three for 3 commodities or trading those commodities for the resources for a third knight that could put me in contention for a victory point, and the decision stalled me for a full minute. That hesitation is the sign of a tuned cost sheet. Another main difference is that coin spending inherently transmits private information in our game. In Cities & Knights, spending wheat is just spending wheat. In The Collective, if the socialists track someone’s spending and find out they spent all their coins on a capitalist policy, the capitalist will be found out. Our cost sheet has to balance as an economy and read as a tell, which is a harder tuning problem than Catan ever faces. We need to playtest mapping every coin swing against the average stack per round, the way Teuber clearly did to figure out his near perfect economy.
Cities & Knights also opens at least six paths to victory, including three Metropolis routes and the Defender of Catan point for fending off barbarians, compared to base Catan’s three. More paths means more players stay in contention, which keeps the social fabric alive. The Collective only has two win conditions per faction, which is part of why a six-coin loss feels like the end of a game for a capitalist. Adding a secondary objective or some kind of role that wreaks a little havoc on the table would give players something to play toward instead of folding.
The social fabric is also where the games diverge most. In my game I rolled nines and threes constantly, sat on a brick port, and traded at two-to-one for anything I needed. The table noticed and stopped trading with me by turn twelve. When my roommate caught up and passed me, the alliance flipped instantly and people started trading me wood so I could cut his roads off. No rule asked them to do this. Open trading produced a dynamic of fluid coalitions. The Collective cannot replicate this because our factions are assigned from the start, but watching Catan’s coalitions form organically clarified what we are giving up by hard-coding teams, and what we have to compensate for through richer economic decisions.
