Settlers of Catan!!!

Question

I have the basic one but i want to know which expansion is the best.

Answer 1

my fav is the Cities and Knights expansion

Answer 2

Our favorite expansion is the Cities and Knight of Catan.  It adds some new options to the game.  In C&K, you get new 'commodity' cards.  Instead of producing 2 of a resources, cities on Mountains, Fields and Pastures instead produce 1 resource and 1 commodity - coins from mountains, cloth from pastures, paper from fields.

You use these commodities to advance three different types of progress (represented by a clever little flip over book for each player; just flip the next piece down when you advance), gaining new abilities, such as the aquaduct which lets you get a resource of a choice when a roll doesn't give you anything.

By being the first to advance in an area, you can gain a monument for  a city and a 2 point bonus.  You can also potentially get a card each turn from your developments, which do all sorts of interesting things.

Instead of armies, you can build knights on the board to block intersections and drive away the robber.  However, you'll need those knights - a barbarian fleet is advancing on Catan!  The fleet advances based on a die roll, and attacks every maybe 10 turns or so.  If all the players combined don't have enough knights, the barbarians destroy a city of the least defended player, reducing it to a settlement.  If the knights can defeat the barbarians, the player with the strongest knights gets an extra VP.

It really adds a lot of depth and variety to the game.

When we play, we usually use both Cities and Knights and Sea Farers; we build the central island normally, then surround it with a ring of water and outlying islands.  We play to 15 points, since there's lots of room to expand.

A lot of the settlers family of games also uses the same core mechanics to give quite a different play experience; Struggle for Rome is one of our favorites.