Catan has been around since 1995. Since then, the game has sold over 32 million copies; with hundreds of millions if not billions of games played. Colonist.io, an online clone of Catan sees between 50,000 and 100,000 games played per day. With these sort of numbers it will come as no surprise that many people have developed their own Catan Strategy. Some appear relatively simple and others branch all the way to absurd. We’ll try to cover the Beginner and Intermediate strategies today.
Table of Contents
- Getting the Basics out of the way
- Development Cards
- Command and Conquer: A Beginner Catan Strategy
- Resource Factory: A Beginner Catan Strategy
- The Shepherd: An Intermediate Catan Strategy
- Summing Up Catan Strategy
Getting the Basics out of the way
The pre-game placement of settlements in Catan will go on to dominate your game and Catan Strategy. What all strategies have in comment is a solid start. It is therefore best to set out some golden rules about what makes Catan unique.
- Resource Balance: Ideally, you want to get one of each resource. Trading with the bank is not efficient and trading with other players will often benefit them in some way too. If you are able to build a sustainable economy, surviving only off the resources you produce you’ll be in a great starting position. Of course, this point is also dependant on how many people you are playing with. A four player game of Catan, the max, will make the board very clustered and harder to place for variety. In that case, its slightly favourable to place on Ore and Wheat because these are later game resources which are necessary for victory, but easy to get blocked out of.
- Maximizing Resource Chance: Each number has Pips on them. The number of Pips shows the probability that the number will be thrown on any given dice throw. Six and Eight, for example, are coloured red and have five pips each. This is because they have the highest probability of being thrown. However, you should not put all your eggs in one basket. You must think about the other two resources your settlement will be collecting from. The most number of Pips that your settlement can be connected to is 13. Anything nine or above is a very strong starting position.
- Diversification of Numbers: As exciting as it is to get as many sixes and eights as possible, as per our last step, it is not always best. That is because Catan is unforgiving. Games with dice and probability are just that, probability. There is no certainty that any dice combination will be thrown, I’ve played games where there were more two’s thrown than sixes. As frustrating as this is, the best way to combat this is through diversification of assets. While we’re not trying to be the Wall Street Journal, the point is still the same – try to cover as many numbers as possible. It will give you more flexibility and also give you more options.
Development Cards
Still falling under the “basics category” of Catan strategy, it is worth giving development cards their own section because development card management is slightly different from setting up the game.
There are 25 development cards in the deck and its worth commenting on their distribution as below:
- 14 Knights – 56%
- 5 Victory Points – 20%
- 2 Road Building – 8%
- 2 Year of Plenty – 8%
- 2 Monopoly – 8%
Command and Conquer: A Beginner Catan Strategy
As we have highlighted above, the Knight is the most common development card. In fact, probability-wise, you are drawing a Knight more than every second card. Knights are powerful in their own right. When you play a Knight you can move the robber. This has a few benefits: First, you can remove the robber from one of your valuable tiles, allowing you the chance to get resources on the next roll; second, you can place the robber on your opponent’s valuable tile (effectively the reverse of the first benefit); third, moving the robber allows you to take a card from your opponent. Taking this card from your opponent can delay their development and get you an extra resource card.
Command and Conquer focuses on getting as many knights as possible. Again, this has multiple benefits. As described above you will begin to dominate and dictate the play while protecting your own assets. More importantly, it will put you one step closer to victory through the largest army condition: having three or more knights in play. Additionally, because you will be cycling so hard through the development deck, you may pick additional victory points, of which there are five possible cards.
Development cards are purchased by trading one ore, one sheep, and one wheat to the bank. Therefore, it stand to reason that you must prioritise ore, sheep and wheat tiles and pips. Ideally you should try to manage resources by the following ratios:
- Wheat and Ore 2:1 Sheep
- Sheep 2:1 Brick and Wood
We are not prioritising road building in this strategy and are more interested in building cities as soon as possible.
As discussed earlier, the beginning of the game is hugely important. The board must be Ore and Wheat rich in order for this strategy to be successful. If this is not possible, you must try another strategy.
Resource Factory: A Beginner Catan Strategy
The resource factory focuses on producing as many resources as possible. It uses the sheer weight of production to dominate your opponents. A strong benefit of this strategy is that it maximizes resource chance – one of our golden rules. By aiming to produce as much as possible it will help you weather any unfortunate rolls. In Addition, this works on pretty much any board set up as you have no particular aim for longest road or strongest army.
You’ll want to aim at getting as many settlements as possible – a max of four. Ideally, you will also be at a 3:1 port or 2:1 port if your resources are one sided, for example, wheat heavy.
While it is a very flexible strategy, it does come with some risk. First, you will get hit with the robber, a lot, you will become public enemy number one because it is clear to see you are so far ahead. Second, your opponents will trade unfairly with you, you have plentiful resources and if you ever want to trade with another player, they will take as much advantage as possible, hence the importance of a 3:1 port.
The Shepherd: An Intermediate Catan Strategy
The Shepherd is an incredibly high risk, high reward strategy – if not only for ego. It is focused on resource imbalance and monopolizing one resource: Sheep. The reason we prioritise sheep is that they are not valued as highly as other resources, they are not needed for roads and they are not needed for cities. What is absolutely critical is that you have access to a 2:1 sheep port. This is because the strategy focuses on feeding all of your sheep into the port to get access to other resources. From there, you essentially dominate the game through sheep. A fun benefit is that you will rarely be a target for the robber – no one really wants the sheep!
A couple of pre-requisites are needed for this strategy:
- A sheep rich board
- Access to a sheep port
- Sheep tiles are close together and not spread out
The reason this is an intermediate strategy is that is goes against our golden rule of resource balance. It is a hard strategy to master, but certainly fun if you manage to pull it off.
Summing Up Catan Strategy
The best Catan Strategy will focus on the three golden rules: resource management, maximising resource chance, and diversification of numbers. The two beginner strategies, command and conquer, and resource factory, need a strong set up to work. Even the shepherd strategy, which goes against our golden rules, requires a sheep rich board set up. Good pre-game placement is essential to success.
