My wife and I played Settlers of Catan frequently and always used the expansion. Now we play Cities and Knights of Catan and still always use the 5-6 player original expansion. Why? This gives us lots of room to expand to our hearts' content and play to 20 points! This expansion just adds some additional tiles, cards, and pieces but they are needed. Now we rarely play with more than 4 people because we feel so restricted on what we can do. Although it is was made so that 6 people can play we feel that what this expansion does is make it so that more than 2 people can play comfortably.

A colleague at work spoke so highly about Settlers that I had to buy it. I used to play lots of strategy board games when I was in college and loved the interaction with my playmates. As I got older and upraded to a computer, I only played online games. After a couple of years of this, I felt something missing, interaction with REAL people. Alas, Catan! It's True. I have played it with 8 friends and they all love it so much that weekend marathons are becoming standard. Two friends have bought this game and three are buying it. Congratulations go out to the makers. Thanks, J.P. for your recomendation.

Some friends and I had a game playing day. We made it through two games, Trivial Pursuit and Nuclear Annihilation, before playing the settlers of Catan. Once we started playing it, we kept playing, trying to implement different strategies. The changing board is an excellent means of varying the players approach to the game. The one thing it could use is an underlying board to place the main board on to make it easier to move.