There are 5 theme sets: Handel & Wandel (Trade & Change), Politik & Intrige (Politics & Intrigue), Ritter & Händler (Knights & Traders), Wissenschaft & Fortschritt (Learning & Progress), and Zauberer & Drachen (Wizards & Dragons). Note that R&H and W&F are just the old Turnier-Set with 2 added promo cards.

You can play two games with the new sets: the expanded game and the tournament game. The tournament game is bascially just the old tournament (constructed-deck) variant. The expanded game uses the cards from one of the new sets to create two new draw, with the basic game expansion piles being reduced in number from 5 to 4.

The cards from the theme sets were clearly designed with the constructed-deck game in mind. I've played the expanded game with each of the different theme sets, and none of them have had any kind of particularly interesting affect on the game, I'm afraid. I think the problem is that they have too many special-purpose cards, so it's usually a much better bet to search in or draw from the normal, basic game expansion piles unless you have somthing very specific in mind.

Back when the Tournament set came out, we used to play by just shuffling all the tournament cards in with the basic decks and adding an extra two expansion piles. This seemed to work fairly well. We haven't yet tried this with the new theme sets, but this might be a better way to integrate them than the "expanded" game. The only problem with that, of course, is that you pretty much have to use the German version of the basic game since the card backs are so different between the Kosmos and Mayfair versions (one of the advantages with the expanded game is you can mix and match sets, since the new theme-set cards are in different piles from the basic game cards).

Anyway, even though we haven't yet found the ideal way to integrate them, the new theme-sets do have a lot of very cool cards in them - especially the Wizards & Dragons, which is more of a variant than just a few added cards. The aesthetics are first-rate as usual. Plus they're cheap. The Settlers Card Game is one of our favorite shorter 2-player games, and the new cards are nice additions that have encouraged us to try the constructed-deck version of the game.