Catan Universe Wiki

Love the game! Very well done! To any developer reading this, I would like to make a few requests: please add another expansion (I would pay another $5 for easily) that adds another ring of resource tiles around the basic game board. Just like the expansion for the board game in real life. That way the play can edit the basic game to have more players, victory points needed to win, more trading ports, and development cards into the pool. Also please add support for Co-Op for two players using the same device in a game. Possibly even up to 4 players on one device? I would also like the ability to play with only 1 other CP in singleplayer mode instead of requiring 3-4 players. There is also a bug that has happened quite often where the check mark does not work in trades with CP’s and forgoes the trade no matter if you click on the red X or the green check mark. The bug also does not allow you to properly re-negotiation the trade with CP’s. Last but not least I would like more edit features when generating the world map instead of only having a few preset “scenarios” to pick from with their own hidden list of possible resource hexes. Thank you for reading and I would love your feedback!

After seeing this game with only a two star rating I was worried about trying it but I did anyways. After downloading it I set up an account because why not...it was free. Even though I already knew how to play the base game Catan it put me through an tutorial which was helpful in the sense to figure out the controls of the app. After the quick tutorial I played a game against the AI and I had a lot of fun. I mean who doesn’t after they win. The game didn’t go easy nor did I feel like I was being teamed up on. It felt authentic and fair throughout. One of my favorite things about this version is that it keeps track of your wins and loses. It’s pretty sweet. You level up as you play and unlock different looks for your avatar and different virtual tables to play on. You can join up with friends and play that way, random matchmaking, or against the AI. Another thing to note is I had no issue logging in or setting up an account as others stated. It seems like the developer is working hard to keep the app up to date and I would hate to see this one die. I was very impressed and will update as I experience the app further.

The game is a great adaptation of the classic strategy board game. However, the tutorial introduces you to many different expansion themed game modes. While these are great when explained (Seafarers for example), the rest have minimal to no tutorial. The gamemode involving upgrading your cities in terms of politics and science offers no explanation as to how to get the resources required to do that or what happens if you can’t defeat the pirates. Even worse, the Rivals of Catan tutorial prompt says “Let me show you the two person card game, Rivals of Catan.” Then, with no explanation, it just throws you into the middle of the game and offers no information as to how this (only slightly similar to the board game) version is even played. It just keeps expecting you to know what to do with no prompt like the prior tutorials had. As for everything else game related, the app is incredible. No bugs. No glitches. Very well integrated and very well explained. Easy to play with friends. All that is necessary is some explanation for the new game modes introduced before just throwing them into the players’ faces.

Love that i can now have Catan on my phone so I can play wherever I go, overall a great app! Only minor critique here as a long term Catan player, the trade options are limited, like you can’t counter offer and that’s a pretty big oversight, you also can’t offer trades to players when it is not your turn, also would be nice if there were pre set dialogues that you can use like Catan online used to have, and the messaging option is only accessible by going into a screen separate from the view of the board, maybe that’s not a big deal to some but it would be helpful to see the chat on the board screen, and last, my only big gripe with the app is the obnoxious angles, I often get stuck at a really awkward viewing angle and I still sometimes can’t get it to show a top view of the board, I mean it’s kind of cool the board view is interactive but it really is more of an annoying feature, if they could add some controls to the view that would be great or just eliminate it altogether, anyways it’s cheap so can’t really say it’s a bad app just needs a few renovations and it will be supreme!

As more and more of my family and friends are exposed to Catan, it is becoming the perfect solution to playing together long distance. I really don’t have much else to say except it provides a near exact representation of the original game in a virtual format. However, note for the app developers, there have been a few coding changes over the past 6 months that I feel could be improved: For example: Incremental numbers that are added or subtracted, such as the number of cards or roads you have in your posession, are being calculated and displayed BEFORE the visual annimation of the cards or roads is being applied. Although this does not change the end result of the calculations, it does cause some visual confusion because it quickly calculates your numbers, and then you watch the cards come and go, but the numbers stay the same because they already changed. Is it possible to adjust the order of the coding to allow for the calculations to take place AFTER or more in SYNC with the visual animations?

I love the visual representation of the game. It’s fun and addictive! Lots of great options for play. Good graphics. Some things take a bit to figure out because there no directions on them but if you know the. Base game it’s fairly easy to figure out. The base game works pretty well the only thing I would suggest is being able to kick out those with weak connections or have the kick timer at 30 seconds and a limit on how many times it can get activated. Additionally, when playing ( and I love that you can live play against others and also just vs AI ) but against AI two will steal from you even when you have less points than both of the Ai’s. I would also like to undo selections when discarding cards. Sometimes I hit the wrong cards and you can’t undo your selections. I would like to see the bugs with cities and knights fixed. I love that game but my settlements will disappear. Lately it will crash my city when the barbarians strike even though I have an active knight to cover it. Sometime it will roll. Resource I’m on but not give me the card. I also had one game where the 7 was rolled 28xs.. need a cap on that, it was like 3x any other number. I would also like to be able to pause or recall when my cards get stolen or another player does something that effects my hand so I can see what was lost. It will go so fast I don’t even know it’s gone. Overall I really love the games and the Ap! I play it all the time.

EDIT 1: some of the main concerns were addressed and - to some extent - corrected. Game breaking bugs in matches were reduced substantially, from about 90% of matches to a healthy 15% (yep, I kept an excel). The in-game interface is still the same, and in my humble opinion, not very intuitive. Regardless, the app is moving in the right direction. Adjusting stars from 1 to 3. REALLY looking forward to the update that was supposed to happen a few hours ago(?). ORIGINAL: The board game is amazing and the app has so much potential. However, it is ridiculously common for a game to get bugged. The problem with that is that it affects all other players, not just whoever got bugged. So the game hangs up thinking no one is having issues, meanwhile this one player is stalling for upwards of 20 mins (and the game cant figure out that something is wrong and just kick him). Kicktimers trigger for no reason when you’re in-game and everything else seems to be doing fine. Not much incentive to level up. Not much to buy in the shop (honestly if there were more items available, with better perks than a viking hat, I’d be throwing money at you guys). Elo visibility is really nice tho, kinda only thing that keeps me and my friends around. Just a tip, elo games tend to not show opponents’ elo in the pre-game screen so that it won’t affect in-game tactics (i.e. 3v1, etc). Really looking forward to an update and hopefully adjusting this rating. Thanks for your hard work!

This game is so close to being one of the best apps on the App Store but it has way too many bugs and issues. A few games in a row now I’ve been foiled by a bug where if you have two ports, a 3 -for-any-resource port and a 2 for something specific port, trading with the bank forces me to pay 3 even if I’m buying the good I should be able to get for 2. Also if I tap the face in the right (which I think might be Arrival on Catan) it asks me to register, even though I’m currently already logged in. And if I log in again it still asks me, forever. Also there’s some really weird UX. Besides the board being a bit unintuitive at first, the game mode buttons at the bottom are also completely unlabeled. They keep telling you to play Arrival on Catan but give you no indication of what this is or how to do it. And you can buy the full version of the game at the shop but it’s very vague what exactly you get from purchasing it. I don’t know if this is a bug or a penalty for paying free but I also get the same map with the same resource and number placements every time. If that is an incentive for upgrading, it’s not doing its job because they don’t make that fact clear.

I love Catan but this game is frustrating. I played free for as long as I could stand it and finally made the switch to get the random board and a couple of the add ons (cities and knights/ harbor master). You can have great board placement with all the right resources and lots of good numbers and no matter how many roles you are getting nothing. When you finally get a couple roles and just get over 8 cards a 7 roles. Meanwhile other players with terrible placement get the same number rolled 4 out of 5 rolls. I’m competitive by nature but this really needs to be fixed. Dice are random but certain numbers should show up more. I just played half a game and while the other players had two or three settlements, I had one road and bought a development card to stay below 8. I just needed two roads from the beginning of the game to move past another player. He is going the complete other way one his other settlement, I then finally get the wood I need for the road and he blocks me. I start the road to go around and on his next turn he places 3 or 4 roads to block me again, without a road building card. Please fix this and make the game about the board placement like it is in real life. Also when is the tournament play supposed to be added?

I love Catan. This app has all the right ideas: great layout, art design, and more. The free option is really good, though I wish I could play more than once every 12 hours. I would gladly buy this game, but unfortunately it’s not worth it. If you’ve read the other reviews you might see issues with the AI. It’s crap. There’s no point in playing master AI, the novice ones seem to be able to play at that level. Random generated dice? It doesn’t seem that random. I’ve probably played at least 100 games so far. Too often what happens is that every number you’re not on is what gets rolled. Let’s say you’re on 8 but not 6 (6 is rolled more often) and vice versa. I’ve had amazing games where I start with 3, 4, 5, 8, 9 (or similar). And yet, 6 and 10 become the hot numbers that game, sometimes occurring consecutively. I’ve had games where 2 has been rolled 4 times in a row. I just played a game where I was ahead by 6 points, and then the AI “somehow” got these amazing rolls to come back and beat me by 3 points. Until they fix the dice and AI, I would just stick to the free version. If you buy the game, then you’re still going to have the issues they were having now

DO NOT PURCHASE THIS GAME!!! This is an honest question. Will it ever work again? It hasn’t worked for the better part of a week now. If you don’t believe me, check out the Catan Universe Facebook page. People vent there. IF the reason why it won’t work is because they are truly making changes to fix the game they haven’t said one word to us. They just let the game not work and let their customers get so frustrated that they leave 500 word reviews. It is beyond ridiculous and shows how poorly of a company this is exactly. I truly feel embarrassed for the developers of this game. I wish I would have read the comments before purchasing this game. It appears as though these issues have been going on for quite some time and they cannot fix it. When I was playing for free and someone would drop out I figured they just didn’t like the way the game was going or something to that effect. No, it turns out the game is kicking people. I have been trying to play and I keep getting a message saying that I am not connecting to the server. Implying that the issue is on my end. Well that certainly is not the case as I have tried both WiFi and cellular data and I just switched to pc and getting the same message. I really am embarrassed for the developers that can’t seem to fix this issue that has been going on for at least a few years. Don’t believe me..check the comments. Lesson learned, I will check comments before downloading in the future.

Get the game... that’s about as far as my story goes. I play one game (tutorial game) stupid because one person got kicked for inactivity. Then after that I finish the settling into Catan or whatever the overall tutorial is and still can’t play the different versions of the regular mode, which it says you need to complete and I did... then all the sudden I can’t even log in because it keeps saying timing out when I have perfectly good internet connection. Then I finally can get logged in and it “can’t connect to the server”, so irritating and I’ve tried like 20 times and still can’t connect to the server. Then I go on the forum and apparently this problem has been going on for two weeks and not a thing has been fixed. Honestly ridiculous and embarrassing for them. Like you get hired to do this crap and you can’t even fix a problem that makes the game UNPLAYABLE... ridiculous. Not even sure how the heck it has 4 stars I LOVE CATAN, LOVE THE IDEA, CANT EVEN PLAY, so who gives a crap what your trying to do, if you can’t play it it doesn’t matter. That’s like showing people you can give them a million bucks if they roll a 2 with a dice, but there’s only ones... oh and one last thing, AI’s freeze up after playing 7s. Think that should be an easy one to fix, but you also can’t FIX YOUR MAIN SERVER... poor people who actually payed for this game and can’t get a refund. Fix this game in less then a week and this 1 Star turns into a 5 in snap...

For the most part this an amazing game. However the reason I’ve given this 1 star is because the game is horrendously glitchy and loaded with bugs. There are some issues that need reprogramming as well. For example, the kicktimer is a whopping 2min. The game does not proceed until these 2 minutes have passed. This needs to be shortened to a maximum of 1min. Also each player is allotted 1min per turn, again this is much too long. I can understand that some turns take that long but there should be a separate “idle” timer for turns. If a player hasn’t clicked the screen or demonstrated some activity then his turn should be skipped after 30s. As far as bugs, sometimes you will load into a game and the screen is black showing only maxed out commodity cards, only way to fix this is to reboot the app. Other times after a 7 is rolled (the robber) the turns freeze. This shows only on some players screens but not others. For example, some people will be waiting for player 3 to go but on his screen he thinks it’s still player 2’s turn. Again this can only be fixed by exiting and rebooting the app. Overall great app and I still love playing it but it can be tremendously frustrating at times. The app need technical maintenance and bug fixes ASAP. Hope this helps.

Really wish the dice roles were actually random, it just ruins the game. Nearly every game just favors the computer. If you have settlements on high probably numbers they basically never role, and anytime you have over 7 cards you get hit with the robber. Computer can literally have +15 cards for like 3 hands, ranking them in somehow from 2’s and 12’s but as soon as you hit 8, boom robbed. Not to mention the cards you do get are useless. Anytime I get ahead on points it’s impossible to get the cards I need to win and finish the game, and you have to watch the computer magically get everything and gain +5 points in like 3 rounds while you just keep getting sheep until you are over 7 cards and then you somehow role 7 every single time and have to give everything away. It’s programmed for you to get close to that win, and then it just somehow slips through your fingers so you keep coming back for more. I read some of the reviews and thought people complaining about the dice roles were just people upset they were losing, but after playing multiple games I completely understand it. I’m glad I haven’t wasted any money on this app and only played the free version because it’s really disappointing.