Your goal is to place towns and cities on the edge of these hexes, and then take turns rolling two six sided dice. Each hexagon also has a number, between 2 and 12.
The play field is broken down into hexagons, and each hex represents a resource of some kind (Wheat, Timber, Stone, Pastures, Clay). If you’ve never played Catan before, it’s a simple enough game. Fundamentally it’s a poorly designed game, and has all the same issues that the other two “classics” share. I use this as the lede to my review of Catan because I think that while it’s currently a darling enjoying mainstream success, and really responsible for driving the “Eurogame” renaissance in board games, I don’t think Catan will endure any better than Monopoly or Risk have. There’s something of value in each, in looking at how they both mirror a whole load of real-world behaviours and attitudes, but I can’t think of a single person that, having a pile of board games to choose between, would choose either Monopoly or Risk for a games evening. Both classics are overly reliant on luck via random dice rolls, limited in strategic scope, and generally unpleasant to play in the way they outright encourage bullying behaviour. Fast forward to today and more people recognise that Monopoly and Risk are both pretty poorly-designed games. Every family had copies, everyone played them, and it was considered a great family activity to break out either of the two on a Sunday afternoon. Once upon a time, Monopoly and Risk were giants of the board game world.