Chapter 0: A Game of Chance
Catan is often a very misunderstood game. A majority of those who first play it end up dismissing it as a dice-roll game that is determined purely on the basis of luck. However, experienced players understand that while there is certainly an element of chance associated with the game, with correct gameplay, one can skew the probabilities in their favor and come out victorious from the most unbelievable positions.
You often see the same players winning National Championships more than once in different years. There are some players who always finish in the top 10 of their region’s championship. A famous example is Bo Peng, who won the New York Catan tournament twice in 2019 and 2020. His current tournament record is 10-0, which means he has won every single tournament game that he has ever played. Such a feat would not have been possible if Catan was a mere dice-roll game. I personally think that the dice is rolled enough times in Catan that luck ends up being only a minor factor in deciding the winner.
A good analogy for the role of luck in Catan is poker. Just like Catan, poker seems like a game of luck at the outset. However, while there is a large element of luck associated with poker in the short term, professional poker players understand that it is completely a game of skill in the long run. Really good poker players mitigate the aspect of luck by consistently making mathematically superior decisions and the same is true for Catan.
I am not advocating the belief that you can win every single game of Catan, no matter how bad the dice rolls, just on the basis of a good strategy. There will be those frustrating games where you will do nothing wrong and still find yourself on the wrong side of victory. Luck does play a factor in Catan and you can still lose individual games despite making sound game decisions. What I am advocating here, however, is that by practicing good game strategies you can win a lot more frequently than just dictated by random chance. In my experience, games where you get completely done over by luck and dice-rolls, despite playing optimally, are few and far in between.
The first step towards becoming a good Catan player is understanding that it is a game of skill and not entirely a game of luck. The second step is developing the skill that separates really good players from amateurs. In this series, I will describe the things that skilled Catan players do better than others. The goal is not just to discuss different tips and tricks to play Catan but to develop a thought process for making better decisions during gameplay. All articles in this series are focused on the standard four-player base game and assume familiarity with the rules of Catan. Each article is focused on a different idea or aspect of the game.
The aim of this series is to formalize a theory for playing Catan based on the insights that experienced players intuitively possess but have never explicitly expressed. I hope to make the reader appreciate the nuances of playing Catan at the highest level and to improve their gameplay by introducing them to advanced strategies. Please click on the links below to navigate to any article in the series.
Chapter 1: The Race to Victory
Chapter 2: Initial Settlements
Chapter 3: Cities and Knights
Chapter 4: The Art of the Trade
Chapter 5: Politics of Catan
– The StarlitKnight
The Quintessential Flâneur 