Like a lot of people, board games helped me get through the first year of the pandemic.
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But living alone, 2020 wasn’t exactly a chance to dust off my copy of Risk or Monopoly.
Instead, I found myself playing Colonist.io, a free online version of the massively popular German board game Settlers of Catan. Over the course of weekly games with a small group of childhood friends (and the occasional match with my dad and brothers), I watched the site transform. What was originally a rough-around-the-edges online game plastered with aggressive pop-up added new features and better graphics on what seemed like a weekly basis.
In a blog post published on February 11, the creator of Colonist.io revealed that the site had grown from 53,471 active users in January 2020 to 701,851 users by January 2021. More than 13 million games have been played on the site since March 2020, and at the peak of the pandemic, as many as 9,000 people were playing at any one time.
It’s been a very good year for the creator of Colonist.io, Demi Yilmaz, but the 29-year-old serial entrepreneur, crypto enthusiast, and freestyle hip-hop dancer tells Inverse that all he wanted was a way to easily play Catan with his family.
Yilmaz grew up in Turkey, where he says he and his father and two brothers used to play boardgames frequently. After moving to Singapore, he and his brother found that there wasn’t an easy way to play Catan online, so they decided to create a website where they could keep the habit up.
Online board game alternative to the popular game Settlers of Catan and PlayCatan. Colonist allows you to play now without the need to download or sign in.
“The available versions sucked,” Yilmaz says. “So we were like, How hard can it be to create our own version?”
Yilmaz and his brother Goku had some experience making online games. Their previous project, Dawn of Crafting, a mobile roleplaying game set during the Stone Age, became an international hit after it was released in 2016. Still, the first version of Colonist, which launched in December 2017, was far from perfect. It even had a different name, Katan.io, a clear nod to the original game that inspired it.
In Settlers of Catan, 2-4 players compete to build the best civilization, collecting and trading resources to build settlements, cities, roads, and armies. Katan.io had all these features, but there was one thing it was missing: the ability for other people to play. Only the first four people to log on at any time could use the site.
“It was good enough for the four of us to play,” Yilmaz says, referring to himself and his immediate family.
Early updates added the ability for multiple games to happen at once, a virtual lobby people could wait in before joining games, the ability to play against a computer, and other basic features. In September 2018, Yilmaz decided to focus on developing Colonist full time. For two years, he saw slow but steady growth. Then, the pandemic happened.
“At that time [the site] was completely unknown,” Yilmaz tells me over email. “We had no idea how many players could come due to the pandemic. Colonist is played by 40k people per day and 700k per month.”
Most of that growth happened in March and April 2020 — the first two months of lockdown. Yilmaz recalls needing to rent more server space each week, and constantly rewriting code and pushing out new updates. It was too much to cope with alone. He hired his first two employees in 2020 and plans to increase the size of the team in 2021.
Most of the money to pay those employees (and himself) came from banner ads on the site, at least at the start. But as the game grew in popularity, Yilmaz expanded the Colonist online store, which offers bonus features for the game like special maps, expansions, and other extras. After working on Colonist for free for years, he tells me he’s currently got “2+ years of runway.”
When asked if he’s worried about getting into legal trouble with the creators of Settlers of Catan, Yilmaz points out that you can’t actually copyright the idea behind a board game. All the code and visuals Yilmaz built are original, even if his game instantly feels familiar to anyone who’s played the board game version of Catan.
Colonist spread entirely by word of mouth with no marketing, but Yilmaz says he owes a lot to Reddit’s Catan community, which discovered Colonist early on. Not only did r/Catan help spread the word, they offered regular feedback, guiding how Yilmaz worked on new updates and features. Next on the list, the team is rolling out leaderboards and rankings, along with their own version of the popular Catan expansion “Cities & Knights.” Even after the pandemic, Colonist isn’t going anywhere.
Settlers Of Catan Free Play
That’s a good thing, because even after my friends and I are all vaccinated, I have a feeling we might still get together online for the occasional game of Colonist. Just like Yilmaz and his family, we’re not always all together in the same place.
And if you’re looking for some advice to help you win your next match, here’s a tip from the Colonist creator himself:
“Trade. The person who collaborates with more players usually ends up at an advantage.”
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There are many places online where you can play Settlers of Catan, one of the most popular board games ever created. Some have pay-to-play models, but most are free.
Today we will be listing the best free to play Catan games on different platforms.
We will also be taking a look at what makes these games good, as well as the reasons why Catan players don’t visit them that much.
Colonist
An online game which you can play inside a browser, Colonist is considered to be the purest Catan implementation on the web. The base game is free and can be played online with up to 4 players. It also provides the option to be played versus AI.
Pros
- It's free!
- Easy to get into. Requires no downloads or sign-ups.
- If you want to play expansions only the host needs to have the expansion purchased and their friends can join in and play.
- A direct line of communication in Discord is available between the devs and its players, and the devs actually listen to players.
- The devs rapidly improve its gameplay, features, and quality.
- Updates are done on a weekly basis so you can be sure that the bug you reported this week will be gone next week. Or the one after.
- Can be played on mobile devices, tablets and also iPads via their web browser.
- Can be played on io game platforms such as iogames.space.
Cons
Colonist is a fairly new game hosted on a web platform. It has a lot of aspects to improve upon like:
- Graphics. There is much left to be desired in terms of in-game graphics and the UI.
- Since its a free game, it currently relies on advertisements to fund its operations.
- It doesn’t have an actual mobile application yet. Can only be accessed on mobile using the browser.
Catan Universe
It is hard to discuss Catan Universe without tackling PlayCatan.
PlayCatan was the best official Catan online game and fans of the original board game loved it. PlayCatan closed down in 2016 and was relaunched as Catan Universe.
Catan Universe is the current official Settlers of Catan online game that is available in multiple platforms, but mainly for PC.
Pros
- It is the official video game version for the Settlers of Catan board game.
- It features multiplayer online play so you can play with other Catan players.
- It has 3D graphics which are pleasing to the eyes.
- All official expansions are available to play but have to be purchased separately.
- Has a native mobile application that works much better than the PC version.
Cons
- Players have to pay $5 to unlock the full base game. The free game mode is only a demo which has a standard map with 3 players and no multiplayer.
- The demo game only lets you play on random maps with 3 or 4 players, but not with friends.
- It is very buggy. Players have long reported the issues with bugs, game crashes, and glitches but the devs are not addressing it.
- They rank #60 position in worst games on Steam. This places Catan Universe at the bottom 0.2%.
- Mac users cannot play Catan Universe for more than a few minutes since Macs have integrated GPUs which are not enough to render high end Unity animations and shading. This causes Macs to warm up which results to slow performance making the game or any other apps unusable.
Xplorers - Asobrain Games
This game is filled with hardcore Catan players who will hand your backside at you on a regular basis.
Launched in 2004, Xplorers is the longest living Catan video game platform in history.
Pros
- Includes basic game as well as expansions like Seafarers, Cities and Knights, and 2 vs 2 teams.
- Community is healthy and player count is high.
- Completely free to play.
Cons
- To create a high end community, Xplorers was positioned as an exclusive platform. Players can only sign up with institutional emails, so public email providers like gmail are not allowed.
- New players would need to wait for 3 months to get approved and be able to play the game.
- Requires installation of plugins and 3rd party software via Java applet.
- Graphics and UI are not really that great.
Jsettlers
Settlers Of Catan online, free
Was Initially created as an AI research project and was last updated back in 2018, Jsettlers only does major updates yearly.
Pros
- Completely free, no need to sign up to be able to play.
- Open source in Github where you can checkout the codebase or contribute.
Cons
- You need to download the source code, build it and run your own server.
- It is not hosted anywhere, so not a viable option unless you are very tech savvy.
- Originally meant to support web but cannot be played in native web, requires installation of plugins and 3d party software via Java applet.
- Graphics and UI are not great.
Settlers Of Catan online, free Mac Game
And there you have it. Good, free sites to scratch that itch to play Catan online anytime, anywhere, right from your fingertips.
Which ones are you playing on right now? What other sites can you recommend? Check out the comments in this reddit thread.