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.

Original catan board game