Just about the best board game I've ever played - and I've played a few, I can tell you. (Including Cheapass stuff.) When I first bought it, in 1999, we played it in my flat about twice a night, three nights a week for about four months. The amount of levels of strategy we evolved through in that time was ludicrous. Even now I could do with playing it maybe a few times a week.
I own the Seafarers and Six-Player expansions but I haven't played Seafarers that much. Both expansions were a revelation, however. Being, as it is in my opinion, the tightest-designed game I have ever seen, I was sceptical that any designed after the fact expansions could really add much to the game. In this I was glad to be proved wrong. Six player really makes the game a lot of fun with the minimal addition of rules (two!) and removes the frustration of having to play with a small number of players. I've only played the Greater Catan variant of Seafarers but it adds whole new levels of strategy to the game which I already stated I considered almost impossible to do. It also revalues what we had already determined to be the two least valuable resources in the game in a way that adds interest to the game as well as making intuitive sense.
My stuff
Online Settlers Game a work in progress done in ASP and JavaScript.
External Links
- Online Settlers
- Java Version. Pretty good, very complete. Only four player standard games and the bots AI isn't very good but there are some good human players out there.
- Catan Is Wicked !!!!!
- Online forum for Catan players.
- Mayfair Games
- The makers of the English Language version of Catan.
- Official Catan Site
- As it was originally a German game, this site is in German.
- GameReview - The Settlers of Catan by Klaus Teuber
- Shroom's Settlers of Catan Resources