Catan is a game loaded with random elements, yet one which is most interesting for the single greatest piece of player agency in its ruleset.
But before I get to that, I should talk about Catan on a broader scale. It’s a game built, first and foremost, around resource management. Place settlements and roads to get the resources you want, spend those resources to build up even more and get more resources, block your opponents from getting resources. Simple. Randomness, of course, is a key element as well. Which space corresponds to which magnitude of a roll of the dice, which development cards you draw, whether or not you EVER GET AN 8 WHICH IS SUPPOSED TO BE ONE OF THE MOST COMMON ROLLS POSSIBLE, STOP ROLLING 10 YOU STUPID DICE!!!
But the mechanic that takes Catan from a fine concept to one of the most consistently fun board games I’ve ever played, is the trading mechanic. It seems simple: On your turn, you can offer cards from your hand to other players, and negotiate which cards who gives, in what amount and ratios. But the strategy this one mechanic opens up is glorious. Each of the 5 resources is important for some different purpose: a player building wide by spreading out and getting lots of settlements is gonna want lots of wood and clay, but to upgrade those settlements into towns, you need stone and wheat, but you can also use those in smaller amounts to get development cards which may give you exceptional benefits. So you want a lot of resources of different types. But what happens if one player manages to stack up where most of one resource is? If the sheep tiles are all occupied by one player, people building settlements will need to trade with them. But then you might have to trade on terms far more favorable to them than to you.
Asymmetry is a pretty difficult mechanic to implement in a game. You want your game to feel fair, for which the players should all have access to the same sorts of resources. But you need to balance that by giving them a non-equal amount of those resources, or generally to make some have advantages over the others. And Catan just makes the tightrope even harder to walk, because all these rules about the amounts of resources are purely hypothetical. Like I said, just because somebody has the wheat tiles which have a 6 and an 8, doesn’t mean that they’ll ever get those. Maybe the guy who just got stuck with a 3 wheat tile, actually gets loaded with wheat. It’s such a precarious position, and Catan navigates the challenge magnificently. It feels almost strange to have a board game where you can either have no player interaction, or constant player interaction, and still be fun as hell.
