In Settlers of Catan, players try to be the dominant force on the island of Catan by building settlements, cities, and roads. On each turn dice are rolled to determine what resources the island produces. Players collect these resources to build up their civilizations to get to 10 victory points and win the game. Multi-award-winning and one of the most popular games in recent history due to its amazing ability to appeal to non-gamers and gamers alike.

The Settlers of Catan (1995), quite simply, is one of the most influential board games of the last several decades. It was one of the first really big board game hits in Germany, and it was one of the first German board games to be a hit in the United States too.

Although innovative and influential, Settlers (1995) remains part of an ongoing stream of game design. You can backtrack the idea of random hexes in a game to Magic Realm (1978) and the pre-game setup of an island shaped collection of hexes to Kings & Things (1986), the latter even including a lot of familiar terrains–including forests, plains, mountains, deserts, and the sea. Likewise you could track other systems to influential games like Civilization (1981) and a number of others. What Settlers does is integrate all of these in an innovative new way that’s simple, yet allows for strategic depth.

Looking at games released more recently, Settlers has been hugely influential. There are games like Roads and Boats (1999), Morisi (2000), and Cannes (2002) that literally look like they were prototyped with the pieces from a Settlers of Catan game. Some recent hits like Puerto Rico (2002) and Age of Mythology (2003) were clearly influenced by Settler’s ideas of resource management. We’re even starting to see a second-generation of German games like Nautilus (2002) where the designers were brought into the hobby through Settlers.

Besides dramatically changing the shape of strategic gaming, Settlers has also spawned a number of more direct heirs. There are two full expansions for the game: The Seafarers of Catan (1997), which adds exploration of the seas; and The Cities & Knights of Catan (2000), which dramatically increases the strategic complexity of the game through limited technology trees, knights, and barbarians. Each of these three games (including Settlers itself) also has an expansion allowing 5 or 6 players to play.

There are also a whole slew of historical supplements, licensed products, card games, and other Catan-mechanic games. Rather than making this review intimidating through a long listing, I simply point to this list of Catan game reviews. The most notable other games are a number of truly independent games which adopt some of the Catan mechanics to widely different milleus. They are: The Settlers of Nurnberg (1999), The Starfarers of Catan (2001), and The Settlers of the Stone Age (2003).

Before closing out it’s worth noting that Catan was originally pitched as a combination exploration/settlement/warfare game. Catan only developed the settlement aspect. Teuber later wrote an exploration game called Entdecker (1996/2001) and a warfare game called Domaine (1997/2003), sort of completing the trilogy (though all the games use entirely independent mechanics).

Though there are a lot of games related to Catan, you can play the core game just fine on its own, and get many hours of enjoyment out of it. If you really like it, however, there’s room for expansion. In my opinion, that’s the best of both worlds.