CATAN Traders & Barbarians Board Game Expansion - Customize Your Asmodee CATAN Experience, Strategy Game, Family Game for Kids and Adults, Ages 12+, 3-4 Players, 90 Minute Playtime

I love the different options with this expansion pack. It is basically four different games in one. My husband and I tried all four of them and we definitely have our favorite and least favorite but we do play them all at different times. We haven't tried any of the other expansion packs yet but I definitely recommend this one because of the many different ways it allows you to play.

Makes the game even more interesting to play.

This expansion is a collection of mini-adjustments. We bought it for the Fisherman and Harbormaster variants, which we had tried and enjoyed at my cousin's house. Fisherman gives players another way to gain resources using the low-probability numbers and Harbormaster gives a 2-victory-point bonus to a player who concentrates on coastline settlements. My wife has shunned the game for several years, but the addition of these tweaks has let her enjoy the game again. The two-player variant is more trouble than we like, so we invented another way to play as a couple. We haven't tried any of the other variants, but I expect we will.

This expansion suffers from not having a unifying theme. Unlike most expansions, this is a group of expansions dumped into one box with a misnomer name. Traders and Barbarians is only two of the expansions in this box and for me, the lest interesting of the group. The major expansions, for me, are the rivers and fishermen. Rivers introduce gold and rules making basic changes to the game’s strategy. Gold can be horded or used to buy resources. Becoming the richest player is a huge advantage while being the poorest player(s) hurts. Two rivers are included with the additional pieces and rules needed. Fishermen add a lake and costal fishing. Fish can be exchange for a variety of items depending on how many you have and what you want. Again, this adds another level of strategy to the game by giving you more access to resources. This is a large expansion with lots of items that should increase your enjoyment of the game. We normally have 3-4 players and use the 5-6 player map when using this expansion.

Love this fun game. Our family is Catan addicted!

Cool expansion but its basically an assortment of mini expanions. There's some expansions that can fit into any typical game of base Catan plus Seafarers but some you have to play a game specifically for that expansion. For example, I like the rivers and bridges, fish and cards instead of dice mini expansions in Traders and Barbarians. Rivers and Bridges adds some extra victory point possibilities (rivers and bridges help get gold coins, gold coins get extra VP for player with most and -1 vp for player with least). The whole richest vs peasant dynamic is funny. The fish expansion makes port/coast cities not as bad as you can get fish that can be traded in for resources or cards or a bunch of stuff. The card instead of dice mini expansion does just that, so there's fixed chances in a way as to what numbers are "chosen." So like if lots of 8s are drawn you know there probably wont be many others till the decks reshuffled. I like the randomness of the dice more myself but the cards also have events which can be fun, something different. The other mini expansions I didn't really even try. They seemed pretty complicated and you would have to play just the mini expansions, adding any other expansions would either not work or be super complicated. So in conclusion while for the Catan lovers I recommend picking this up, but if you don't have Seafarers yet I recommend starting there.

gives multiple scenarios to the classic game

Update: We were able to get the peace we needed and love this expansion. Thanks for listing. In the end, we contacted Amazon and were able to make a trade with our set with missing peses for a compleat seat vary happy how it turned out. I was really excited to play the different scenarios in the Traders and Barbarians Expansion. I was reading through the manual and setting pieces up only to discover that I was missing all 22 camels and all 36 barbarians. I am really upset that I can not play over half of the scenarios which were the reason I bought the expansion. The service for replacing missing pieces from the Catan website is no longer in service so it is not possible to replace those pieces. If the expansion had come with all of it's pieces it would be great, but I warn future buyers about missing essential pieces.

Game is fine- however, the box is damaged. It is a birthday gift, so a bit disappointing as it has been hotly anticipated.

After paying full price I was sent a SECOND hand, DAMAGED box. Nowhere does it day that it was second hand.