App review: Catan

Setters of Catan, on which Catan: The First Island is based, is a legendary board game from Germany. The board consists of a series of hexagonal tiles representing different resources, each having a number indicating what dice roll will produce a resource of that type.  These resources are used to build roads, settlements and cities along the intersections of the tiles.  Each player gets points for each settlement and city that they build, as well as for other conditions that come up along the course of the game (building the longest road, for example). Cards can also be purchased with resources to provide one time advantages like extra resources, free road pieces, or an opportunity to move the "robber" who blocks resources from one tile on the board.  It's a game, like chess, that has a simple set of rules but is fairly deep in terms of strategy.

I should pause here to note for Catan connoisseurs that this version of Catan only contains the base set. There are no options to add expansions like Seafarers or to increase the number of players beyond four. There are, however, some rules variants available, like the friendly robber and dice stacking. There is currently no word on the future availability of expansions, though the fact that the subtitle of the game is The First Island implies that those expansions might be releases as separate games.

As a beginning player, I dove into the tutorials before starting my first game, and was a bit underwhelmed, as the tutorials are non-interactive and dump quite a bit of information on the player at once.  (Catan may be simple, but there's enough going on that you really need someone or something holding your hand the first time through to get the hang of it.)  I was expecting something more along the lines of the tutorial in the Xbox 360 version, which teaches you to play as you play your first game.

Once in the game, though, the game provides a fairly authentic Catan experience, as long as you don't mind playing against the computer or have friends in the same room to play against, since there is no online multiplayer. The computer AI does a decent job, though, and there are different personalities from which you can choose, though I honestly didn't notice too much of a difference between them.  It would be nice if you could just choose a standard difficulty level rather than having to figure out the right combination of computer players for your skill level, though.  One gripe that I have across all the players is that they seem to be happy to trade resources amongst themselves but are extremely stubborn to respond to the human player's trade requests regardless of the situation, which can be extremely frustrating and kind of dampens the experience a bit.  

The game's presentation is adequate to facilitate playing the game, though it's pretty obvious that it was developed by the same team that produced the DS version of Catan. Though cartoony, it's generally easy enough to distinguish between the different types of tiles and determine where settlements and roads are, which is all you really need. The animations are nice but get old quickly and end up taking a lot of time. Thankfully, you can speed these up in the options; a turbo mode was added in a recent update which eliminates all but the most basic of animations, which speeds the game up tremendously.

Overall, while there is certainly room for improvement, Catan: The First Island is a faithful translation of the game to the iPhone and makes for a great way to kill five or ten minutes by playing a few rounds. It provides a fulfilling Catan experience even despite some of its shortcomings. This version might be a bit too hard to pick up for complete novices and insufficient for the truly hardcore, but for everyone in between, it is well worth the $5 investment.

Learn more about the Catan app for iPhone and iPod touch in the App Store

About Bill Palmer

Bill Palmer is Editor in Chief of Beatweek Magazine. His editorial contributions include interviews with musicians and iPhone industry coverage.