Players: 1-4
Playing Time: 15 minutes

The Game Components

The Catan Dice Game comes in a small box, notable because it retails for only $12. The entire game is comprised of just dice and a game sheet pad.

Dice: Six wooden dice, each side of which is printed with one of the major Catan resources (red bricks, brown wood, yellow wheat, gray sheep, or black ore) or else gold-foiled gold. The dice are pretty easy to quickly and intuitively read, other than the fact that I sometimes confused gold and ore if the light wasn't bright enough.

Game Sheet Pad: A 60-page pad of double-sided sheets of paper. Each game sheet depicts an island of Catan along with the things you can build (roads, knights, settlements, and cities). Each page also contains a list of what's needed to construct all the items and a score track.

Rulebook: A short 6-page rulebook with plentiful examples that makes it easy to play the game.

Overall, the components of the Catan Dice Game are of good quality and easy to use but nothing spectacular. I've given them an average "3" out of "5" for Style.

The Game Play

The object of the Catan Dice Game is to earn the most points by building roads, settlements, cities, and knights over 15 rounds of play.

Setup: Each player gets a piece of paper.

The paper shows a map of Catan with potential buildings drawn upon it. A potential road runs around the island, with some branches, connecting up various potential houses and settlements. (I say "potential", because these are all the things that you can build, each in specified places, but clearly you haven't built any at start.) In addition there are six porential knights placed upon "production hexes", one for each major resource in Catan, plus one "wild" hex.

Rolling the Dice: On his turn a player throws six dice. He may then take a second roll, rerolling as many of them as he wants and then a third roll, doing the same.

Modifying Rolls. There are two ways to modify the final roll.

First, any two dice which display the gold nugget may be turned in to get one resource of your choice.

Second, you may use any constructed knight to turn a die into a resource of the type that the knight guards (but only once per knight over the course of the game).

Spending Resources: Once you've got your final set of dice, then you can purchases stuff per the usual Catan costs:

• Road: brick, wood
• Knight: ore, sheep, wheat
• Settlement: brick, wood, sheep, wheat
• City: ore x3, wheat x2

Everything that you build generates you victory points toward winning the game.

Each of the roads is worth only 1 point, but they're required to get to the settlements and cities. The settlements go up in value from 3 to 11, the cities go up in value from 7 to 30, and the knights go up in value from 1 to 6. Each of those has to be built in order of increasing value.

If you built one or more things, you record the sum of their values for your turn. If you built nothing, you record a -2.

Ending the Game: The game ends after 15 rounds of play, with the winner being the player with the highest total score.

Relationships to Other Games

The Catan Dice Game is a Yahtzee-style game, where you're trying to make combos of dice fit certain formulae. In Yahtzee it was Poker hands like straights and full houses; here it's instead the Settlers of Catan building formulae.

The Game Design

However, in comparing the Settlers Dice Game to Yahtzee, I don't find it terribly notable. Yahtzee has more choices, and also more hard decisions (such as deciding when you're going to use a so-so result to fill in what could be a great score). In the Settlers Dice Game you instead you a maximum of four possibilities at any time, and those are not all always available. In addition, because the results are all-or-nothing you lose a level of harder decisions.

None of that is necessarily a complaint about the game, but rather a statement that it's a simpler game than Yahtzee, though perhaps one that allows for a bit more brinkmanship.

However I will complain about the fact that the game is totally solitaire. Calling a game "multiplayer solitaire" has become a bit overdone, but this is a game where I think it's really the case. There's literally no way that you can interact with the other players. The only reason to take your turns in order is so that you can see how well the other players are doing, and gauge your risk accordingly.

This may be addressed in a variant of this game that Klaus Teuber has designed and released on the web; therein you basically score points as in The Settlers of Catan, and thus can compete for longest road and largest army. I considering trying that variant out too, and may do so in a future review, but for now I've decided to review the Catan Dice Game as it's been released.

Generally, there's nothing terribly wrong about the Catan Dice Game, but there's not a lot that excites me either. I've scored it as "3" out of "5": it's a fairly average family game. If there aren't a lot of choices, that's offset by the fact that it's very quick to play as well.

However, if you're a big Settlers fan, you may enjoy it more than the average, and you really can't go wrong with the low price point and the easily portable size.

Conclusion

The Catan Dice Game doesn't rise to the heights of some of the other recent dicing releases on the market like To Court the King, Airships, and Kingsburg, but it's small and cheap and will appeal to fans of The Settlers of Catan.

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