Catan
Catan is a strategy board game in which players gather and trade resources to build settlements, roads, and cities across a variable island map.
Resource management: The planning and allocation of limited resources to achieve goals over time. Players weigh whether to spend scarce cards now or save them for larger builds.
Hex map: A map composed of adjoining six-sided cells. Catan’s modular island is assembled from hexagonal terrain tiles.
Klaus Teuber: A German board-game designer best known for creating Catan. Teuber designed the game and developed its island-building system.
Catan: Seafarers: An expansion for Catan that adds ships, sea routes, and island scenarios. It extends exploration beyond the starting island using connected sea routes.
Carcassonne: A tile-laying board game in which players build a medieval landscape and place followers to score features. Like Catan, it uses a changing map, but players place landscape tiles rather than trade resources.
Dice: Small objects with numbered faces used to generate random outcomes in games. Each turn’s roll determines which numbered terrain hexes produce resources.
Resource (Catan): A Catan card representing lumber, brick, wool, grain, or ore used for construction and development. These five card types are the basic inputs for every major build.
Kosmos (publisher): A German publishing company known for books, toys, and board games. Kosmos published the original German edition in 1995.
Catan: Cities & Knights: A Catan expansion that adds city improvements, knights, and a cooperative threat to the island. It deepens development choices and changes how players defend the island.
Ticket to Ride: A board game in which players collect colored cards to claim railway routes between cities. Both games reward network building, but Ticket to Ride has no player-to-player trading.