Even better, three soldiers gets you the Largest Army card. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: soldiers can be used to move the Robber off of one of your tiles, or just to move it to a place that will hinder your opponents. Given the distribution of the types of Development Cards in the deck, the odds are that you’re likely to draw a soldier. Soldiers dominate the Development Cards, but other good cards can be drawn as well. Once you read it, you lay it face down in front of you where it festers, creating suspicions amongst your opponents, until you choose to use it. A sheep, a wheat, and an ore gets you the top card from the deck. Then I realized the more experienced players in my group were frequently buying Development Cardsĭevelopment Cards are the only truly hidden element in Catan.
Catan board game trade build settle upgrade#
Ore was always hard to come by and using ore to upgrade a Settlement to a City was a guaranteed extra point. When I started playing Catan, I didn’t get Development Cards. (See below) Respect the Development Cards But be careful with this strategy, since someone else can easily build a longer road and steal your hard earned points. In a game that’s all about resources, sometimes you need to be cutthroat to win. If you can isolate an opponent to a small area of the board, you can decrease their chances of winning considerably. This not only increases your chances at those additional Settlement resources, but also influences what tiles your opponents have Settlement access to and, therefore, what resources they can produce on a roll of the dice. Your long road also allows you to build additional Settlements. Blue possesses the Longest Road and the two points that comes along with it. Build five contiguous road segments and you claim the Longest Road tile and the two Victory Points that come along with it. When you play the odds you can gain those cards either through dice rolls or through trading.įocusing on gaining wood and brick will allow you to expand your road system. After all, resources can be traded to the bank at 4:1 or at Ports for an even better return (see below).īalance Longest Road with Additional More Resourcesīuilding roads and Settlements are the best way to expand your ability to gain resources on a given turn. The type of resource matters less than the frequency of obtaining them. When looking for intersections to place your first Settlements, pay less attention to the type of resource and more attention to the number of dots on the hex tiles that make up the intersections. Six and eight? After seven, these are the most likely to be rolled. The two and twelve chits get a single dot because they each take a very specific roll (each die rolls one each die rolls six) to achieve. The more dots, the more likely that number is to be rolled - meaning the more likely those resources will be handed out. These dots indicate how likely that number is to appear on a given roll of the two dice. Each chit shows the number that needs to be rolled to produce the resource represented to any player with an adjacent Settlement. Numbered discs with dots representing the 2D6 likelihood of being rolledĮach hexagonal resource tile in Catan gets a round chit placed on top of them. Pay attention to the numbers - and not the resources - that, statistically, are the most likely to appear. Don’t just surrender to the absolute randomness of the numbers that may or may not produce resources when the dice are rolled.
I soon learned that while the Longest Road is helpful, my approach to placing those first Settlements needed to be better balanced.Ĭatan is a dice game. I decided to try and follow this idea and focused solely on the two things necessary for roads: brick and wood.
One of my regular gaming friends likes to go after the Longest Road. Part of Catan’s success has been due to designer Klaus Teuber’s ability to combine different gaming mechanics (resource management, trading, route building, dice rolling) in a way that made the game easy to teach and learn, while maintaining enough depth to make the game challenging for serious players.ĭespite it being such a relatively simple game, there are some people who shrewdly manage to convert resources into points with speed and ease while others seem to be barely getting started by the time another player announces they’ve scored their tenth point and have won the game.Īfter my most recent back-to-back losses I decided to take a closer look at Catan and see what I’ve been doing wrong and, more importantly, what I should start doing right.
When Catan (or The Settlers of Catan, as it was originally named) was first published in 1995 it created something of a revelation in board game circles, undeniably changing the way people would look at board games and gaming in general.
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