Catan review – surpassed but irreplaceable

Few games have made a mark on the board game hobby like Catan. First released in Germany in 1995, Catan’s 1996 English language edition was the tip of the spear for European board games entering the Anglo-American market.

Catan’s success made English speakers eager for more games like it, which lead to more Eurogame imports. Those in turn inspired American designers to innovate, increasing the visibility of their games in Europe where they began to influence Eurogame design. This feedback loop ultimately led to the diverse board game hobby we know today. But the question in this 2024 Catan review is: should you bother with it today?

This review is based on team Wargamer’s experiences playing Catan on and off for decades. Frankly, the review is long overdue, as Catan has a nigh-unshakeable spot on our guide to the best board games ever. The photographs come from a staff copy.

What is Catan?

Catan is a game of trading, building routes and settlements, and a little bit of luck. All the players are settling a (conveniently) uninhabited island made from hexes of resource-generating terrain. Starting with a couple of settlements, each player gradually lays roads and erects settlements across the island. As the island becomes more and more crowded players will find themselves hemmed in by their neighbours, locked out of the resources they need to expand, and must trade their stockpiled goods if they want to succeed.

Though this sounds very run of the mill today, Catan was somewhat revolutionary when it arrived in the American board game market. Notwithstanding family board games like Monopoly, and the under-recognised genius of Sid Sackson (creator of Acquire), most Anglo-American board games for adults centered direct player-on-player conflict, and high degrees of randomness. ‘Eurogames’ were novel for their indirect competition, pacifistic themes, low or no randomness, and an iron core of mathematical game balance.

Over the years, players have recognised an irony in the idea that Eurogames are strictly pacifist. Catan uses the theme of European colonial settlement of an island as set-dressing, completely ignoring the real world history of such settlement, which was characterised by war, genocide, and slavery. It’s understandable how this happened: more so than ‘Ameritrash’ games, Eurogames are often designed mechanically first, with their theme pasted on top.

It was only when fans and critics pointed out the implications of these games’ settings that designers began to examine them more thoroughly. The game’s original title ‘Settlers of Catan’ has been dropped, emphasising that it occurs in a fantasy world where early modern Europeans could discover a habitable island that was, somehow, not already inhabited.

What’s in the box?

There are multiple editions of Catan, ranging from a petite travel edition to a massive (and hugely expensive) anniversary edition with 3D components. That’s not to mention all the third-party custom sets you may be able to find online, and the many, many Catan expansions and variants. But the core game of Catan is pretty simple.

The island is made up of individual hexes, held in place by a frame that represents the ocean. Settlements, roads, and cities are represented by wooden tokens, with a single pawn to represent a robber who will occasionally spoil your schemes. Resources are represented by cards, as are single-use development cards. A couple of dice are used to decide which hexes of the island will generate resources each turn. And of course there’s a set of rules.

Graphically it’s an understated design, but it’s homely rather than bland. The rulebook is functional – not a problem to work with, but not inspirational either.

How does it play?

Catan starts with the promise of an open frontier, and ends with passive aggressive players snarling at one another as they tread all over one another’s ties. Your goal is to get to 10 victory points, which you will do by owning settlements (one VP) or cities (two VPs), being the player with the longest road at least five sections long (two VPs), being the player who has played at least three and the most Knight development cards (two VPs), or by simply owning development cards that provide victory points.

You’ll use resources to expand your network of roads and settlements, to upgrade settlements to cities, or to purchase a random Development card; it might provide VPs, or a useful single-use effect.  Each hex on the island produces a particular resource, such as wood, sheep, or wheat, which will go to players who control a settlement built on one of its vertices.

But the hexes aren’t reliable. To start each turn the active player rolls 2D6, and any hexes marked with a number matching the total will produce the goods. Because the results of this roll aren’t all equally likely, different hexes will produce goods more or less often, coughing up resources to different players at different rates depending on where their villages are placed. Inevitably the players will find themselves starving for some resources and flooded with others.

That’s where trading comes in, together with the time-honored gag “I’ve got wood if you’ve got sheep” . You can always trade resources with the bank at a ruinous 4:1 exchange rate, and building settlements adjacent to the sea will unlock ports that offer slightly better deals for certain goods. But to get really profitable trades, players must strike deals with one another. You can do this any time during your turn, in any way that feels agreeable, though development cards are off the table.

What’s more, there’s an irksome little robber in the mix. Any time a player rolls a seven – a one in six chance – the robber moves, squatting on a hex and preventing it from generating resources. Playing a Knight development card also shifts the robber, and steals a resource from a player with a settlement adjacent to the hex. This little thief is as close to direct conflict as the game gets.

Players start the game with two settlements and two roads, and slowly grow their domain over successive turns. Each hex edge can only hold one player’s road, while each vertex can only hold one settlement. It all gets very close very fast. There’s no way to destroy another player’s creations, but you can get in their way, cut them off, and – with a bit of clever work – build a settlement in the middle of one of their roads, snipping it in half and possibly stealing the Longest Road victory points from them.

A game of Catan ends as soon as a player declares they have 10 victory points on their turn. While the number of settlements on the board is obvious, as is the longest road, VP from development cards are kept hidden. Your first game will be spent feeling your way around this system, but once you know the routes to victory you’ll spend subsequent playthroughs jockeying for position and trying to maximise how effective you are.

Problems and hidden depth

Catan relies a on players understanding the value and opportunities that come from trading with each other. If players don’t strike deals the game will stall out as everyone wastes turns building massive stockpiles of things they don’t need while waiting for a drip-feed of the goods that they do. Four player games are much better than three player, as they make it easier to find trades that are beneficial to both parties – not to mention increasing the tension over land.

That core game is solid, if reliant on players engaging with all its systems, but there’s a hidden layer of depth to Catan that only comes to the surface once you and your opponents fully understand it. As an optional rule, players can start the game by collectively building the island, altering how the resource hexes sit next to one another, and the numbers in their centers.

The recommended layout for the island creates a fairly even and fair distribution of resources based on the likelihood of different dice rolls and how important the different resources are at different game stages, players can throw that completely out of the window.

By the standards of modern euro boardgames, Catan is thin. But considered as an abstract game, it’s a veritable feast. Go and Chess may be deeper, but you can’t play them four player, there’s no trading, and you don’t open play by collaboratively shaping the mathematical landscape that will define the game.

Who is it for?

Catan is a fairly simple design that newcomers to the hobby will find approachable, and old hands will find relaxing – until they decide to really master it, at which point the knives will come out.

It’s no longer the essential game that it once was: every idea in it has been iterated on and realised more completely elsewhere (often a long time ago!). The dice-rolling, resource-gathering system forms the core of Machi Koro; Ticket to Ride wrangles a whole game out of passive-aggressive route building; Bohnanza is all about trading, trading, trading. But if you want to understand the history of modern board game design, it’s an absolute must play.

Verdict

Think of Catan like a Buddha bowl meal – simple ingredients combined without pretense, and undeniably wholesome. Or perhaps it’s more like an opera: no longer the cutting edge of pop culture, perhaps a little bit sedate, but still with the capacity to thrill and move you.

There are better games than Catan, and it’s no longer the game we recommend to newcomers, but Catan is Catan is Catan. It’s no longer a game that you need to own, but it’s certainly one that every board gamer needs to play.

Source: Wargamer