Today, my wife, Beth, and I played The Settlers Of Catan Card Game, completing my Game Challenge of the week to play a 2-player game. Since all the Catan games have dropped "The Settlers Of" part of the name, I believe the game was eventually called Catan Card Game but the current version of this game is called Rivals For Catan, although there do appear to be some other options for variant game play with the later versions. This one that we own was the original official 2-player version of the game, although many years ago my wife and I had played a 2-player variant of The Settlers Of Catan, which I believe was referred to as Intimate Settlers, but I think that was more like a Seafarers variant of the original game, unlike this card game.
This game is strictly for 2-players, with the setup being fairly static. My wife and I got started with our opposing principalities, and soon after getting started, Beth upgraded one of her Settlements to a City and picked up the Windmill Token for Commerce. It took a while for me to get a City, but I did get my Settlements built up a little faster than she did. However, she had a strong foothold on the Commerce and quite often used it to take away some of my hard earned resources. Even though I eventually built some Commerce in my principality, I wasn't ever able to take away the Windmill Token from her. I did gain the Knights Token eventually, but it felt like it barely came into use in comparison to how much her Windmill Token did.
Later in the game, I managed to get the last available Settlement built, at which point she felt she was clearly going to loose because she had only 8 points and needed 4 more to win the game. However, I only had 1 City at that point, and had quite a bit more to go even though I had maxed out the width of my principality.
I was able to use The Merchant and The Spy effectively to get some cards from Beth before she was able build them. The Mint and The Sawmill were great cards for me that I was able to get away from her and build myself. Aside from that, we didn't have any Action cards played at all during the game, so it was a fairly friendly game with the only attacks coming from the dice rolls and Event Deck.
In the end, Beth managed to upgrade her cities with buildings for additional victory points. She won the game with 12 points and I finished with 9.