Review: Catan Dice Game

Catan: The Dice Game is designed by Klaus Teuber and was released in 2007. And it is yet another game in the Catan series of games. The game is very short and you should be able to play it solo (which is the only way you should play this game) in about 15 minutes. The rulebook is very short and you can have the game down in only 5 minutes and you probably won’t have to look back at it during play at all.

The game is played by rolling the six dice on your turn up to three times and setting aside certain dice and re-rolling others just like in Yahtzee. After you have done this you can use the resources that you rolled to build either a road, settlement, city, or knight. When you build a certain thing you shade it in on the board which is a pad of paper that has room for up to 120 games on it. However, there are certain rules about what you can build. For instance, a settlement/city has to be connected to road and roads have to be connected to other roads just like in normal Settlers. The catch is that you have to build knights, settlements, and cities in the order of their point value. For example you have to first build the settlement worth 3 points before you build the settlement that is worth 4 points and so on. Cities start out at 7 points and can be worth up to 30 points and knights are worth 1-6. This makes you have to plan out how you want to use your resources and where you want to go on the map.

The game feels a whole lot like Yahtzee but it is a little bit more involved. There’s a rule that if you roll 2 gold resources you can exchange them for 1 of any resource. And each knight that you build has a resource next to it that once per game you can change a resource that you rolled for the one next to the knight. This provides just enough thought/risk to game the game fairly entertaining.

The rules say you can play this game with 1-4 players but technically you can play it with as many people as you want. Just give each of them a game board/paper. However, there is absolutely no player interaction in this game at all so I myself will never play this game with anyone else. Think about Yahtzee. It’s technically a multiplayer game but really it’s a solitaire game that you compare scores with your opponents at the end of the game. That’s basically what this is and I’d rather play something with more interaction with more people so I prefer this game solitaire. The big plus here is that the game is so portable you can seriously play this in a car (if you’re not driving of course). So I wouldn’t pick this game up if you want a game for a group of people. I wouldn’t even pick this up for strictly a solitaire game that you would just play during your free time. But if you need a game to play on those long car/plane rides that provides enough thought to make it interesting than this is the game for you. The game is basically the same every time you play but it still works well for a travel game which is really all Catan: The Dice Game tries to be.

Catan: The Dice Game is a very simple, light, dice game that provides enough thought and strategy to keep the game interesting but it wouldn’t be worth picking up if it wasn’t so portable. 

6.5/10

Casey Stump