I'm an avid gamer, having played everything from Chess to Starcraft to Torres and I have to say that Cities and Knights is one of the best games I've played ever. It's a little complicated, though, but it's a lot better balanced than either Settlers and Seafarers of Catan, as you can control the ascent of the winning players through a whole lot of methods, and losing players have many, many ways to get back in the game.

There's a lot more strategy here than initially meets the eye.

Re: the Aqueduct. Technically, the Aqueduct only gives you whatever resource you want if you're not producing anything else. Ergo, if you are producing something else, it doesn't help you any. Being able to receive one resource of your choice when you aren't going to receive anything anyway is great for smoothing out the production-luck factor but hardly game-winning. Much better to receive multiple resources and commodities every turn and then trading.

In addition, the green line of city development usually produces very weak progress cards compared to yellow and doesn't help you dominate Catan defense like blue. When you go for green, with the help of the Aqueduct, you usually go for massive infrastructure development; with yellow, you go for monopolizing resources and commodities. If you go for blue, you go for military strength, which can go a long way considering you can earn as much as 4-5 VP on winning Catan defense alone.

I've yet to find a single overpowering strategy in the game that can't be matched by another equally powerful strategy. Most of all, it's fun to be able to claw and wend your way back into the game after sitting at 4 points for 20 minutes.

I highly recommend Cities and Knights of Catan to anyone who enjoys the Settlers of Catan and is beginning to find it a bit too simple.

The 5-6 player expansion functions just as it should and just as well as the other 5-6 player expansions.

Many fans of Settlers find the Aqueduct unbalancing. I didnt find the Aqueduct unbalancing as it only allows one to trade commodities (paper, silk, and coin) and not resources (lumber, brick, ore, grain, and wool) at the 2:1 rate. Therefore, no hex is turned to gold (like in Seafarers), as cities that produce commodities only produce one at a time. However, if one was playing so that the 2:1 rate applied to both commodities and resources, this would indeed be game breaking, and an easy mistake to make.

According to Mayfair:

http://www.coolgames.com/mfg/information/0495-ltr.html

The error was an accident affecting limited numbers of the product. They will send you replacement pieces if you got the messed-up ones.

Their appology is dated Dec 31 2001, and I purchased my copy mid-Jan 2002 and my pieces were fine. So, don't worry about messed-up pieces. The problem has been solved.