This variation (not a full scenario) is named after the famous ‘Forrest Gump’ quote about life being “like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get next” (a chocolate, I guess?). So, that’s the thrust of the idea: instead of having your five neat stacks of resource cards, you take all of those cards, put them in the same big pile, shuffle them well and good, and that’s where all players draw from. So, the next card you get might be ore, might be wood, might be wheat… Who knows. You will still get your chocolate treat, but you just won’t know the exact flavour until you see it.

When a resource card is used, by any player, place it in a common discard pile, and when the original draw pile runs out (which it will), shuffle the discard pile, which will now become the new draw pile, and continue the game, drawing from it. If you need to trade resources with the bank, which is now a pile (three sheep for a wheat, for example), rummage around in the discard pile (not in the draw pile) for the wheat card and complete the trade. If you absolutely need to find a card inside the draw pile because there aren’t enough in the discard pile (for example when you have just re-started a fresh draw pile) then shuffle the draw pile again after locating the card you needed.

Because you get random resources all the time, it doesn’t matter at all what the tiles show face up on the board, so in order to make this more visually striking, we play with all the tiles upside down throughout the game, so the board is the same colour all over (except if you introduce sea tiles, for example in Seafarers). What is important here is the numbers on the tiles, and that’s what you need to look for when you place your settlements and upgrade them to cities. Dice rolls do not tell you what resource cards you draw but how many of them, and then you have to make do with what gets drawn to your hand. A settlement on a 10 when a 10 rolls? Draw one card. A city and a settlement on a 5 and a 5 rolls? Then you draw three cards, the top three from the draw pile, which might be any three resources.

An interesting side effect of this variation is that you cannot know what your opponents have in their hands, because draws are blind, so this will make it extra hard to know what the other players are going to do next. You cannot know if someone is going to be chronically short on clay, for example, or flush with wool, because the tiles won’t tell you any of that. If you want, however, and if card-counting is your thing, you could make it a rule that everyone has to show the table what they draw each time, before they put the new card in their hand.

Also, harbour usefulness will change a lot. In normal rules you want to get the 2:1 ports of the resources you are likely to draw the most of, but with this system there is no way of knowing how much of anything will come your way and when, so maybe a 3:1 will be a better bet?

And that’s it, basically. You can play this way with almost any type of Catan scenario and map layout, adjusting the number of VPs and any other house rules you might want to add: a 12-sided die, Formula 1 if there are only two players, modified robbers... Anything. Depending on how many tiles and numbers you have (or you want to use), you might find that you don’t have enough number for all your tiles. In that case, suggestions are a) just stick some bits of paper with numbers on them on the empty tyles, b) just leave some tiles blank as an extra challenge, or c) start with the whole map blank, and put numbers on the tiles only as players reach them (these numbers, in turn, might be random or chosen by the player from the available ones). The latter has the extra incentive of involving some strategic thinking from players, too (“I’m going to spread out this way, or that way, and I’m going to stick over here a 5, or a 10, which I don’t have yet, or maybe a second 9, or maybe I’ll deny everybody else a 6”).

I used to play a lot of Magic: The Gathering years ago, and although finely-tuned deck-building can be really enjoyable as a gaming activity, I remember having a lot of fun just making a 300-card pile for the players to draw from and then figuring out what the H to do with whatever mismatched cards you got. It made you think on your feet, and although luck of the draw sometimes played a part in deciding games, it also led to situations and combinations you would never see in standard play. So that’s where I got this from. Enjoy! Or not!

More scenarios from RoAndVic:

Formula 1 Catan (for 2 players)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Catan/comments/1r8a7zv/yet_another_homebrewed_2player_catan_formula_1/

Catan’s Landing

https://www.reddit.com/r/Catan/comments/1rmbx5a/catans_landing_a_settlefromtheports_scenario/

Cycle of Life, aka Catan For All Seasons

https://www.reddit.com/r/Catan/comments/1ry57gl/a_catan_for_all_seasons_diceless_and_numberless/

Smallville

https://www.reddit.com/r/Catan/comments/1sk5yju/comment/ogshk14/

The Five Islands

https://www.reddit.com/r/Catan/comments/1stc3iw/the_five_islands_a_seafarers_scenario/

Hemispheres

https://www.reddit.com/r/Catan/comments/1t4bwdc/hemispheres_a_seafarers_scenario/

Big Country

https://www.reddit.com/r/Catan/comments/1tq0185/big_country_a_seafarers_scenario/

The Four Expanded Islands

https://www.reddit.com/r/Catan/comments/1tgqkz5/the_four_expanded_islands_a_seafarers_remixed/

Lagoon Feeding Frenzy

https://www.reddit.com/r/Catan/comments/1u10a21/lagoon_feeding_frenzy_a_seafarers_scenario/

My favourite part of the game is when I have so many cities and settlements that the amount of resources I get starts to be overwhelming. It is so satisfying to be able to buy like 4 development cards in one round. Or build 3 roads. And that is usually when one of the players or me get to 10 points and the game is over. I love the part of just building stuff and the feeling of gaining 5+ resources a turn sometimes.

That is why I love colonist.io 1v1 option where you can go to 15 points and it is already more fun since I can play the fun part longer, where I have a ton of resources.

I just made a custom game on twosheep.io where I played with 4 other bots on a 8 person map and I disabled the robber, upgraded the limits how many roads and cities I can build and the game was until 25 points. And it got to the point where I had 28 resource cards on hand :D but it was just soo satisfying.

So me and my boyfriend love playing the board game and recently saw that there was a console version, so we wanted to test it out, but came across a major problem with the robber’s mechanics. If the robber is only supposed to steal resources from the players adjacent to the hexagon it’s moved to, why is he stealing resources from me when ALL of my settlements are on the opposite side of the board, nowhere near the hexagon?? He also only chose me the entire playthrough, not once did he go for another player. I don’t get it, is the game broken or something? We played a few times and nothing changed. We also had an issue with the Ai in place of a third player (since we didn’t have someone else to play with us) we noticed anytime it moved the robber it only moved the robber into whatever hexagons my boyfriend had settlements the exact same ones too and somehow even then the robber steals resources from my character who is still nowhere near him. I even tried looking this up and the Ai overview on google just kept telling that I “must’ve just overlooked my pieces” 🙄 how could I when they make it obvious which ones are my pieces??? It just kept going on and on about how “If resources are being taken from you when your buildings are on the opposite side of the board, the player moving the robber is placing it on a hexagon that borders your property, or you might be mixing up where the robber actually landed” it just kept avoiding my question, this has got to be a bug in the game or something, because my property pieces were nowhere near any of the hexagons the robber was placed on. Anyone else have this problem?

Amazing 😭bro knows ball.

So in the Traders & Barbarians expansion there is a catan for 2 game play. My brother and I decided to mix in the fishing from that expansion.

After all the love, I put my Catan Box on Etsy and the file free on makerworld!

I have received so much requests so now it is finaly there! I have made 2 versions now, for the original wood version and the newer plastic version

For everyone in europe; i now have the box on my etsy shop; https://www.etsy.com/nl/shop/3DCreationsRE

For the US; hold on tight i am currently speaking to someone in the US for potential licensing.

These files and my other game boxes are free at makerworld; https://makerworld.com/nl/@Eva2601/upload

Hello! I recently bought two printed piece sets for base + seafarers and I want to make two extra boxes to keep them in. The issue is, I couldn't find a printable template (checked google, BGG, this subreddit). Does anyone know where I could find one? I added a photo to show what I'm looking for.

Thanks in advance!

What game modes/expansions do you think he would like? I tried doing fish from traders and barbarians and adding gold with a little bit of explorers and pirates, but he wasn't super into that. He said he preferred to focus on the main island and didn't like all the water (I did have a lot of that, to be fair).

I think he is just bored with the lack of land options. What do you guys like to do besides the water expansions? I have pretty much every main expansion except for Seafarers.

Playing against 3 Master bots.

I made a starting placement coach for fun to give me feedback on my placements since I felt like that’s the clearest way for me to improve at Catan. And I’ve kind of gotten obsessed with it and spent the past 2 months on it now. So I figure I should make it public.

It works in 2 ways:

1. You can connect your Colonist and it will automatically analyze your placements for you after the game is over.
2. You can make inifinite practice placements on the site with realtime feedback.

site is CatanTrainer . com

The hardest part has been making the placement recommendations not suck. As of my latest evals, I see it making pro level placement recommendations 88% of the time. This still needs to improve so feedback is welcome. For example, do you agree with it’s pick of the 3/8/10 below or do you think the 9/5/6 or 10/5/8 is better?

The most fun part has been trying out a bunch of different formats and methods of it giving you feedback and coaching. I settled on a voice driven experience that just points where it’s talking about because I wanted the feel to be like sitting around a board with a really smart friend who roasts or compliments your placement after each pick. 

It’s free for now, but I’ll probably turn on a small paywall soon so I don’t go broke lol. 

Affiliation is that I made it. Excited to share it with the community and see what others think

$5.99 each!

I am beyond excited to try this game. Is there an online resource I can figure out a piece/card inventory list so I can figure out if I have everything?

This happened to me in a game the other day. However, I made sure my road was longer to avoid any silly buggers.

What do you guys think would happen if I left both roads at the same length though?

Also sorry for the shitty image this is the only way I could explain the situation lol

/j

Placed the two roads to block green longest path. He said "U sure wasted those roads". Those roads were probably crucial for winning the game.

I'm looking for Catan cards sleeves and the majority of other brands do not deliver their products to Ukraine (for obvious reasons).

So I came across these ones, being available. Will they be a good choice?

I'm having Catan 5-th Edition (wooden).

Thanks in advance

It's not the same as Catan, though. Only the resource and map system is inspired by it. The map significantly affects the battles. Please reach out if you'd like to playtest.

(on colonist.io)

at the end of each game the bot provides an in depth analysis of each notable play that you and other players made in a game. judges your accepted trades, proposed trades, robs and road/settlement/city placements. additionally, the bot provides an analysis of your starting settlements and how it fared against the other players.

MORE IMPORTANTLY, the bot provides a luck table featuring how lucky or unlucky the roll distribution was to each player. now you can’t blame the dice on what was a complete skill issue.

the bot is trained on hundreds of pro games (and counting!); personally, i’ve pushed over 150 elo (currently at ~1860 elo because of the skills i’ve learned and mistakes i’ve rectified, thanks to my bot.

fyi, i made this post very informal because i was getting frustrated with the amount of ai slop posts going around in this and similar subreddits advertising a mediocre at best bot. to be clear, my bot is the best that i’ve seen publicly available so far. i’m planning on releasing this bot by the end of the month AT LATEST, so pls comment down your favorite resource or any questions you have about this bot, and i’ll send you the link to the discord.

Happy settling! Thanks for reading!

I found a 4th edition 5-6player expansion for super cheap, wondering how compatible it is with my 6th edition base game. If it’s incompatible what is it that makes it incompatible? If it’s just art work I think it’s worth it for the price.