Not really. Cities & Knights is a horrible expansion that just adds needless complications (so complicated that each player gets a little book to help them out). Although if you are a hardcore “min/max” sort of gamer you might be into that.
Seafarers adds an interesting twist without getting too complicated, but traveling between islands isn’t quite as satisfying as being able to plop down roads along the way.
Best option: just buy a second normal set, so you can have a bigger playing field and more pieces. Then pick one of the numerous ‘house rules’ or ‘alternate rules’ out there on the internet or create your own. With a second set, you could even recreate a Seafarers sort of game.
The ‘book’ isn’t much more involved than the price sheet that comes with the original.
It’s got three different sections of flip cards, each section with multiple cards. I’d call that at the very least ten times as complicated.
Slightly off-topic, but what about the other base-set Catan games, like Spacefarers? Are any of those worth picking up? I’ve only ever played the original.
When Starfarers first came out my friend got it. I never got a chance to play it with him but I remember him characterizing it as not as good as Settlers, but that the set itself was really nice. On boardgamegeek’s list of top space games, Starship Catan is rated higher than Starfarers.
Except that the vast majority of the cards are identical on each page. The only thing that changes is the price to flip to the next level, the numbers that allow a event card draw, and the special powers on the last 2 pages. You could accomplish the same thing with a single cost sheet and 3 dice or 3 piles of tokens.
Love Cities & Knights.
Like Seafarers.
Love them both together.
5-6 expansions are ok for 5, but we’d usually rather break into 2 games. 6 is just to much, everything bogs down.
I’ve lost track of all the permutations of the mini-expansions, but some of the variants in Das Buch are fun when you tire of the base game. Same for the variants like the historical scenarios.
Starfarers is better than I thought on the first few plays. (Note that Starship Catan and Starfarers are two different games) It grows on me a bit each time. The bits are somewhat excessive, but the exploration mechanic adds a nice twist.
Same with Settlers of the Stone Age. I like the exploration mechanic there too, as well as the de-populating of the start position, forcing you to move out.
Candamir is also a lot of fun, but it’s very different than regular Settlers. More like Settlers: the RPG. We did burn out on it after a few dozen games though.
Elasund has been an ugly experience each time I’ve played it. I’ll give it one more chance, but that might be it.
Settlers of Nurnberg is very good too. Lots of interesting twists on the original.
ETA: forgot to mention that the best source for info about any and all of these games (and more!) is www.boardgamegeek.com
specifically for the Catan family: Game: Catan | Family | BoardGameGeek
This is the general opinion of my group although I personally enjoy Cities and Knights. We use Seafarers with the 5-6 player rules but without the “Special Building Phase.” This keeps things interesting when you have 6 players all trying to build up their hand. Also, we use a lot of random distribution of the tiles. It creates some unusual scenarios.
The cards in place of dice does not appeal to me. Part of the game is the gamble of getting good returns on unlikely placements. Sure, we all try to get the best numbers first. But it can be fun when the guy stuck with the crappy location gets three great rolls in a row.
I don’t find that to be an issue – if you do, it’s easy enough to house-rule it out. (Instead, just bump the hand limit up a bit to mitigate the problem of accumulating enough cards between turns to be burned by the robber, which is the problem the interturn-build rule was created to address.)