How to play Catan

Catan is a classic settlement-building game by Klaus Teuber in which you and your rivals colonize a hex-tile island, collecting five resources — brick, lumber, wool, grain, and ore — to construct roads, settlements, and cities. The board is randomized each game, so no two islands play the same way.

Success demands both smart building and smart dealing: dice luck evens out over time, but the player who reads the board, negotiates well, and races to key positions first will almost always find a path to ten victory points before anyone else does.

Never played a trading game like this? The loop is friendlier than it sounds. Each turn someone rolls two dice, and every hex marked with that number pays out to everyone settled beside it — so you collect cards on other people's turns too, and you're never just waiting. On your own turn you roll, then haggle cards with the table or the bank, then spend them on pieces from a fixed price list. That's the whole game — roll, collect, trade, build — repeated until someone shows ten points.

What's in the box, and what each piece does at the table:

• 19 terrain hexes — the island itself: 4 forest (lumber), 4 pasture (wool), 4 fields (grain), 3 hills (brick), 3 mountains (ore), and 1 desert that produces nothing and hosts the robber. Shuffled into a new island every game.
• 6 sea frame pieces — snap together around the hexes to lock the island in place; their coastlines are where the harbors sit.
• 9 harbor pieces (4 generic 3:1, 5 resource-specific 2:1) — placed on marked coastal spots. Settle the intersection beside one and you trade with the bank at its better rate for the rest of the game.
• 18 number tokens (numbered 2–12; one each of 2 and 12, no 7) — sit on the hexes and tell you which roll makes each hex pay. The dots under each number show its probability — 6 and 8 carry five dots and hit most often. The letters on the backs (A–R) exist only to lay out a balanced random board.
• 95 resource cards (19 each of brick, lumber, wool, grain, ore) — the game's only currency: dice pay them out, trades move them around, and buildings consume them. The supply is finite — if a roll owes more of a resource than the bank holds, nobody gets that resource (unless only one player is owed).
• 25 development cards (14 Knights, 6 Progress — 2 each of Road Building, Year of Plenty, Monopoly — and 5 Victory Points) — bought blind for 1 wool + 1 grain + 1 ore and kept hidden. Knights move the robber and build toward Largest Army; Victory Point cards stay secret until they win you the game.
• 60 roads (15 per color) — the edges of your network: every new settlement must connect to your roads, and a 5-segment unbroken road claims Longest Road.
• 20 settlements (5 per color) — worth 1 VP each and collect 1 card from every adjacent hex that pays. Only 5 exist per player — a hard cap that forces you toward cities.
• 16 cities (4 per color) — upgraded settlements: worth 2 VP and collect 2 cards from each paying hex. The upgraded settlement piece returns to your supply, ready to be placed again.
• 4 building costs cards — one per player: the full price list, always face up so nobody has to memorize costs.
• 2 special cards: Longest Road & Largest Army (2 VP each) — trophies that change hands the moment someone beats the current holder, swinging 4 points in one move.
• 2 dice (1 yellow, 1 red) — rolled together at the start of every turn; the sum picks which hexes produce for the whole table.
• 1 robber — starts on the desert; a 7 or a Knight moves it. It shuts down the hex it sits on and lets the mover steal a card.

Play proceeds clockwise, and your turn is always the same three phases in order — roll, trade, build:

1. Roll for production. Roll both dice. Every player — not just you — collects 1 resource card per settlement adjacent to a hex whose number matches the roll, and 2 per city. The robber blocks the hex it occupies: that hex pays no one.
2. On a 7, the robber strikes. No one produces. First, every player holding more than 7 resource cards discards half of them (rounded down). Then you move the robber to any other hex and steal 1 random card from one player of your choice with a settlement or city beside it.
3. Trade. Deal with the table or the bank, in any mix. Domestic trade: negotiate freely, but every trade must include you — the other players may not trade among themselves, and you can never simply give cards away. Maritime trade: 4:1 with the bank is always available; a settlement on a generic harbor improves that to 3:1, and a special harbor gives 2:1 for its printed resource only.
4. Build. Spend resources on anything you can afford, as many times as you can pay: a road costs 1 brick + 1 lumber (must extend your network; one road per edge); a settlement costs 1 each of brick, lumber, wool, and grain (needs a road connection and the distance rule); a city costs 2 grain + 3 ore and replaces one of your settlements; a development card costs 1 wool + 1 grain + 1 ore, drawn from the top of the deck into your hidden hand.
5. Development cards — one per turn, any time. You may play 1 development card at any point during your turn, even before rolling — but never a card bought that same turn (except a Victory Point card that carries you to 10). A Knight moves the robber, steals a card, and stays face up counting toward Largest Army. Road Building places 2 free roads; Year of Plenty takes any 2 resources from the bank; Monopoly names a resource and takes every card of it from all opponents.

A turn in practice. Ana rolls an 8. Her settlement beside the 8-mountains collects 1 ore — and across the table Beto's city on the same hex collects 2, on Ana's turn. Holding 3 ore and 1 grain, Ana asks who will sell grain; Carla trades 1 grain for 1 wool, and Ana upgrades her settlement to a city (2 grain + 3 ore). Then she plays the Knight she bought last turn, parks the robber on Diego's 6-fields, and steals a random card from him. Diego, sitting on eight cards, quietly hopes the next roll isn't a 7.

Major expansions such as Seafarers and Cities & Knights add new modules and mechanics, but they all run on top of this same roll-trade-build core.

The first player to have 10 victory points during their own turn wins immediately — if you hit 10 on someone else's turn, you must survive until your next turn to claim it. Points come from: each settlement (1 VP), each city (2 VP), holding Longest Road — a continuous road of at least 5 segments (2 VP), holding Largest Army — at least 3 Knights played, more than anyone else (2 VP), and any Victory Point development cards you reveal. There are no tiebreakers: because victory is declared mid-turn, exactly one player crosses the line.

Strategically, aim to settle near high-probability numbers (6 and 8 are rolled most often) and diversify your resource access early. Don't ignore Longest Road and Largest Army — either card changes hands the moment someone overtakes the holder, a 4-point swing that flips close games. And keep an eye on your hand size: carrying more than 7 cards into someone else's 7 roll is a costly, avoidable mistake.