Catan Universe Game Reviews

Game is Great! (when it works). My friends and I have loved the board game Settlers of Catan for years and were thrilled to find a way to play it online with each other since we live far apart now. We have paid for the online expansion pack and when the game works, it works well and everyone enjoys it. However, recently we have been encountering more and more bugs that make the game unplayable. The worst bug occurs when playing with other people and the computer selections. After one of the computers prompts a trade, the game will freeze and not progress forward. All of the buttons are still interactive, but nothing will progress the game off of the computers turn. We also consistently struggle with the app not loading or launching a game and being stuck at the loading screen before sending us back to the home screen. We haven’t been able to play a few games with no issues in probably a month now. Very frustrating user experience for an otherwise great app. Reduced to one star because the app is unplayable for the last two days. Try to start a match and it just says “Find running game…” and loads continuously. Will not let me load a game single player or multiplayer. Incredibly frustrating.

Just like the board game, but with frustrating AI. Super fun app, but a few things I’ve noticed: 1. The AI can make actions (buy settlements, play dev cards, etc.) at the start of a turn (before they roll) even though I cannot, so they have an advantage where they can drop to under 7 cards BEFORE a 7 is rolled. 2. Sometimes the AI will offer me a trade, and I will accept it, but instead of trading, they will offer me another, better, trade. So I accept that, but instead of it going through, they offer me yet another better trade. It seems like the game gets hung up where my accept button is actually denying the trade, so the AI is offering me better and better deals, but I’m never able to make the trade go through. They eventually trade 4-1 with the bank, and it is frustrating. 3. The UI is not intuitive at all. After I finished the first few games, I had to quit the entire app because I couldn’t figure out how to get back to the home screen without shutting down the entire game. After a while I found where you can click through several screens to get back to the main menu, but it is unnecessarily complicated. 4. Also, as others have said, the dice are clearly not random.

King card cannot be placed. Update: the issue with the king card was resolved the game still needs to be simplified with the controls but none the less it’s a great game with developers who are making consistent adjustments and updates. I highly recommend! The game is good until it comes time to place the king card once that happens when you click it your finger is able to drag it around the screen but it won’t place, when you remove your finger from the screen the king card goes back into your deck. They need to just make it a button to press verses dragging it it’s to complex and needs to be simplified. If this gets fixed then honestly the game would be worth 5 stars but it ruins the game play entirely so it’s my ranking is 3 stars until this problem is fixed. I did look online but could not find anyway to place the king card so I’m really hoping for an update that addresses this issue. It’s a game with great potential!

Fun but has some fundamental flaws. I wanted to learn how to play this game before buying the real board game. For that purpose it did it’s job. However, there are some flaws in this game that make it not fun to play at all. There is definitely a problem with AI trading. I had games where I was middle of the pack and I kept only getting 1 or 2 resources ( because of odd dice rolling but I’ll get to that late) AI will not trade with you even if they have excess resources and even if you offer ridiculous abundance of every resources. You have to rely solely on the 4:1 trade ratio unless of course you get robbed which happens to me almost every single time I have 8 resources. Which brings me to my next point. The dice rolling is so odd in this game. Over the course of my last 4 games I payed closer attention and noticed that 2-3 numbers which have statically low chances of getting rolled get rolled significantly more by 3-4x the amount of other rolls ? Some times that happens in real life too but not every game? During the game I’m thinking okay it’s not a big deal I’ll just have to use the 4:1 trade. Nope, think again, most times I try to do that I just get robbed. So now I have no resources and I’m just in a perpetual state of AI not trading me and getting robbed. Now that I know how to play I will just play with friends, the way this AI is designed make it not fun to play.

1 game… 1 game every 24 hours?. So I’m new to Catan and I saw this free version of the game and they gave me one game I got to go through the tutorial and I got one game and said that I didn’t get another game for 24 hours no I understand if you guys want to sell maps or skins or any like cosmetic things but to only get one game every 24 hours is ridiculous and then on top of that you have another game which is the classic version it’s only five dollars so I could buy the classic version for five bucks or I could pay two dollars for 200 games now the price if you were to sell it like that is reasonable I suppose because I wouldn’t see myself needing more than 200 games if I’m still getting one game every day but as a new player I can’t believe that you would give me at least 10 or 20 games for free to get me into the game but only one game you give me one game to start out with and then you start asking for money like how much supposed to learn the game how much supposed to get into the game I’m very flabbergasted by this and if you expect people to actually play your game and possibly pay to play which I think is ridiculous against AI nonetheless I would really highly suggest you give a new player more than one game more than five games more than 10 games give somebody 1520 games so that they can actually practice and then learn how to play

Extremely disappointed. Get the game... that’s about as far as my story goes. I play one game (tutorial game) stupid because one person got kicked for inactivity. Then after that I finish the settling into Catan or whatever the overall tutorial is and still can’t play the different versions of the regular mode, which it says you need to complete and I did... then all the sudden I can’t even log in because it keeps saying timing out when I have perfectly good internet connection. Then I finally can get logged in and it “can’t connect to the server”, so irritating and I’ve tried like 20 times and still can’t connect to the server. Then I go on the forum and apparently this problem has been going on for two weeks and not a thing has been fixed. Honestly ridiculous and embarrassing for them. Like you get hired to do this crap and you can’t even fix a problem that makes the game UNPLAYABLE... ridiculous. Not even sure how the heck it has 4 stars I LOVE CATAN, LOVE THE IDEA, CANT EVEN PLAY, so who gives a crap what your trying to do, if you can’t play it it doesn’t matter. That’s like showing people you can give them a million bucks if they roll a 2 with a dice, but there’s only ones... oh and one last thing, AI’s freeze up after playing 7s. Think that should be an easy one to fix, but you also can’t FIX YOUR MAIN SERVER... poor people who actually payed for this game and can’t get a refund. Fix this game in less then a week and this 1 Star turns into a 5 in snap...

Glitchy and Slow. For the most part this an amazing game. However the reason I’ve given this 1 star is because the game is horrendously glitchy and loaded with bugs. There are some issues that need reprogramming as well. For example, the kicktimer is a whopping 2min. The game does not proceed until these 2 minutes have passed. This needs to be shortened to a maximum of 1min. Also each player is allotted 1min per turn, again this is much too long. I can understand that some turns take that long but there should be a separate “idle” timer for turns. If a player hasn’t clicked the screen or demonstrated some activity then his turn should be skipped after 30s. As far as bugs, sometimes you will load into a game and the screen is black showing only maxed out commodity cards, only way to fix this is to reboot the app. Other times after a 7 is rolled (the robber) the turns freeze. This shows only on some players screens but not others. For example, some people will be waiting for player 3 to go but on his screen he thinks it’s still player 2’s turn. Again this can only be fixed by exiting and rebooting the app. Overall great app and I still love playing it but it can be tremendously frustrating at times. The app need technical maintenance and bug fixes ASAP. Hope this helps.

Great game and well integrated, though expansion tutorials are needed.. The game is a great adaptation of the classic strategy board game. However, the tutorial introduces you to many different expansion themed game modes. While these are great when explained (Seafarers for example), the rest have minimal to no tutorial. The gamemode involving upgrading your cities in terms of politics and science offers no explanation as to how to get the resources required to do that or what happens if you can’t defeat the pirates. Even worse, the Rivals of Catan tutorial prompt says “Let me show you the two person card game, Rivals of Catan.” Then, with no explanation, it just throws you into the middle of the game and offers no information as to how this (only slightly similar to the board game) version is even played. It just keeps expecting you to know what to do with no prompt like the prior tutorials had. As for everything else game related, the app is incredible. No bugs. No glitches. Very well integrated and very well explained. Easy to play with friends. All that is necessary is some explanation for the new game modes introduced before just throwing them into the players’ faces.

Was really hoping for 5 human player support. Got the original app hoping to play it as a family, nope. We all have ticket to ride which supports up to 5 live players locally or online, replaces with an Ai in the event of disconnect and uses a karma system to curb game quitters etc. I was excited to see this game released in an updated app, hoping for an experience like that of ticket to ride, or even exploding cats, this isn’t even close yet. With 3 local people playing in the online setting we can’t even get through 1 quarter of a 10 point basic first island game. It glitches or crashes like everyone comments on, not only for special moves like the robber, just at random, taking away the ability to end a turn, forcing all of us to leave the game because the end turn button disappears. We are keeping the app and sincerely hoping they get some good programmers to put this in order because sooo many of us would be ecstatic and support it. 3 stars for the potential and hope to have it in the future although, sadly, it isn’t playable right now.

How embarrassing. DO NOT PURCHASE THIS GAME!!! This is an honest question. Will it ever work again? It hasn’t worked for the better part of a week now. If you don’t believe me, check out the Catan Universe Facebook page. People vent there. IF the reason why it won’t work is because they are truly making changes to fix the game they haven’t said one word to us. They just let the game not work and let their customers get so frustrated that they leave 500 word reviews. It is beyond ridiculous and shows how poorly of a company this is exactly. I truly feel embarrassed for the developers of this game. I wish I would have read the comments before purchasing this game. It appears as though these issues have been going on for quite some time and they cannot fix it. When I was playing for free and someone would drop out I figured they just didn’t like the way the game was going or something to that effect. No, it turns out the game is kicking people. I have been trying to play and I keep getting a message saying that I am not connecting to the server. Implying that the issue is on my end. Well that certainly is not the case as I have tried both WiFi and cellular data and I just switched to pc and getting the same message. I really am embarrassed for the developers that can’t seem to fix this issue that has been going on for at least a few years. Don’t believe me..check the comments. Lesson learned, I will check comments before downloading in the future.

Great except.... The dice rolling. I’m sure I’m not the first to say so and I’m certainly not going to be the last. It might be the only thing I dislike about the app as a whole, but it honestly leeches the joy out of the game. I find myself prioritizing how I think the dice rolls will play out based on the board rather than good strategy. Is there 8 on lumber with a lumber port, don’t count on 8’s rolling. Just use the inventor card? I’ll put money it rolls whatever you switched out. Robber get placed on your number guarantee it gets rolled immediately after and probably 2 or three times in a row. How bout some stats? I just played a game where out of the first 30 rolls 15 of them were the same 2 numbers. I’ve been playing this game for years, pre the Catan universe release and I’ve enjoyed a lot of it. One of the few apps I’ve ever been more than happy to purchase. But the dice roll algorithm is utterly broken, I’d even says it’s getting worse and it might push me away. Please don’t let that happen. PLEASE, PLEASE fix this.

Amazing game, app could use a little work. Catan is obviously an incredible game, and I have a ton of fun playing it in this app. Really great being able to play with friends, being able to send messages back and forth etc. The reason I am not giving this 5 stars is because the app itself could use a little bit of work. For example, I am on an iPhone XR. A lot of times when I click to see info on something, the text window that pops up has a portion off screen, which makes it unreadable. It is quite frustrating sometimes when I need to be able to read something and can’t. I payed the 5 dollars for the app, and I would be willing to bet many other people have too. Some of that money should be used to pay a programmer to fix these issues. It would not be difficult and I would be more than happy to fix it for free just to get it done. Other than that, I’m very happy with the purchase.

Dice Rate/Progress Cards/AI. I love Catan and play matches frequently against bots. I’ve slowly gotten better but when I play against Master level AI they bully you into oblivion even when you’re not winning. I recently played a c&k match that was the tipping point for me. During setup, I got favorable positions that should have a good resource rate however the robber was rolled nearly half the time and the AI only cycled between putting it on my resource tiles and stealing from me. Had absolutely no resources, any progress cards I got weren’t helpful — how can I use my 3 merchants with no resources to trade. I’m all for a good challenge, and I admit there may be a skill gap, but how can anyone possibly get ahead if AI are only stealing from me, removing my roads/ships, removing/stealing my knights and making me lose my city to barbarians, all the while I cant gain resources because 7 is constantly rolled and my tiles always blocked — the end of game stats reveal the imbalance. Please tone down the Master levels AI — its unplayable.

“Find running game…”. I absolutely love the game of Catan, and I have enjoyed many hours of single player play in this game. But almost two weeks ago now, this error message “Find running game…” popped up at the top of the screen, and now no single player game modes will load. I can navigate around the menu/profile/settings, but no game will actually load. Nothing has been done to fix this and I see no way to do it myself. Add this on to the terrible multiplayer experience (major bugs with adding friends, etc.), various crashes, times I’ve been logged out and can’t reset my password… it’s just extremely frustrating that such an amazing (and popular!) game like Catan doesn’t have a well developed or maintained app. I’ve enjoyed the single player gameplay enough to not give the app a 1 star, and the game could easily be a 5 star if developed properly and if issues like the one I have were actually fixed. But I’m clearly not alone in having major issues with this app.

So close, but too buggy and some bad UX. This game is so close to being one of the best apps on the App Store but it has way too many bugs and issues. A few games in a row now I’ve been foiled by a bug where if you have two ports, a 3 -for-any-resource port and a 2 for something specific port, trading with the bank forces me to pay 3 even if I’m buying the good I should be able to get for 2. Also if I tap the face in the right (which I think might be Arrival on Catan) it asks me to register, even though I’m currently already logged in. And if I log in again it still asks me, forever. Also there’s some really weird UX. Besides the board being a bit unintuitive at first, the game mode buttons at the bottom are also completely unlabeled. They keep telling you to play Arrival on Catan but give you no indication of what this is or how to do it. And you can buy the full version of the game at the shop but it’s very vague what exactly you get from purchasing it. I don’t know if this is a bug or a penalty for paying free but I also get the same map with the same resource and number placements every time. If that is an incentive for upgrading, it’s not doing its job because they don’t make that fact clear.

Not even fun. Super buggy and only allows 3 player multiplayer at a time. Most of the time it seems like the “multiplayer” is just ai that gangs up on you. Trade is non-existent, to the point that you have to accept bad deals for any deal to be made or an entire game will literally go without trade. I played 20 games and each time, the dice rolls kept giving numbers that I was not on (if I played by 8, six would be rolled mainly, if you play by six then 10 would be rolled) it gets pretty ridiculous when six turns go by and you don’t get a single resource because none of your numbers got rolled, then you have to skip your turn again while you watch the other two get all of the resources. Then on to building. You don’t always get to build settlements even if you have the resources. I have had to maritime trade resources hoping that I can make some kind of comeback by adding a settlement after a freshly made road is put down and then there isn’t even option to make one. So you’ll end up with plenty of useless roads instead of settlements that can help you out.

Nice breadth of options but questionable design. Overall it’s not terrible for a free app but Catan Classic is far better for $5. My biggest issue here is that the dice rolls are very obviously not random. You might think this is just a sore loser but I’m serious, if you play cities and knights but expand victory points to 21 play repeatedly and you’ll agree within 3 games. I like the randomness of dice rolls so I’m hesitant to use the stacked deck of numbers but it’s a must for this app. One of the apps work arounds for not making this skewness in rolled numbers so obvious is by timing your numbers for when they’re under a robber so you won’t get resources but if you check the stats it’ll look closer to even in rolls than it really is. The bots also rob at random, I’ve been in last in a 6 person game with bots that are at 8-12 VPs while I’m still at 4 yet they’ll place the robber on a tile that only I’m on and steal from me. Alternatively, I’ve been a point away from winning ahead of the closest bot by 5 points and they’ll steal from a bot that is no where near winning. I wish they’d program the bots to just stealing from the current leader

Better than you think. After seeing this game with only a two star rating I was worried about trying it but I did anyways. After downloading it I set up an account because why not...it was free. Even though I already knew how to play the base game Catan it put me through an tutorial which was helpful in the sense to figure out the controls of the app. After the quick tutorial I played a game against the AI and I had a lot of fun. I mean who doesn’t after they win. The game didn’t go easy nor did I feel like I was being teamed up on. It felt authentic and fair throughout. One of my favorite things about this version is that it keeps track of your wins and loses. It’s pretty sweet. You level up as you play and unlock different looks for your avatar and different virtual tables to play on. You can join up with friends and play that way, random matchmaking, or against the AI. Another thing to note is I had no issue logging in or setting up an account as others stated. It seems like the developer is working hard to keep the app up to date and I would hate to see this one die. I was very impressed and will update as I experience the app further.

BE CAREFUL! (Updated). Update1: Well, once we’ve recovered the option of resetting the password, I really enjoy the game. Will leave it at 4 stars right now. Expensive in app purchases. I bought one of the expansions because that’s the only way of playing against computer generated characters. If not you have to play against human opponents and some times that’s not convenient (wanting to be able to pause the game half way through, for example). Well, after a couple of days, the app asked me for my password. Of course, I didn’t remember and I still don’t remember. I use 1Password and Apple own password storing “app”, but I didn’t this time. Anyway I had seen that they had the option and assumed that I could always reset my password. WRONG!!! They have the option, but it doesn’t work. I wrote to their support email and they told me that the reset password option doesn’t work and there’s nothing they can do. So long story short I just lost $10 and they’re not willing to give me any solution. I find terrible that an app that asks you to pay for some of its “services” in 2018, doesn’t have a functioning option to reset your password or something similar. Yes, I know I should remember my password and that’s my bad, but every other app with the need of a password has a reset password option that actually works. That’s why they ask for your email and a bunch of other info.

Extremely Buggy. EDIT 1: some of the main concerns were addressed and - to some extent - corrected. Game breaking bugs in matches were reduced substantially, from about 90% of matches to a healthy 15% (yep, I kept an excel). The in-game interface is still the same, and in my humble opinion, not very intuitive. Regardless, the app is moving in the right direction. Adjusting stars from 1 to 3. REALLY looking forward to the update that was supposed to happen a few hours ago(?). ORIGINAL: The board game is amazing and the app has so much potential. However, it is ridiculously common for a game to get bugged. The problem with that is that it affects all other players, not just whoever got bugged. So the game hangs up thinking no one is having issues, meanwhile this one player is stalling for upwards of 20 mins (and the game cant figure out that something is wrong and just kick him). Kicktimers trigger for no reason when you’re in-game and everything else seems to be doing fine. Not much incentive to level up. Not much to buy in the shop (honestly if there were more items available, with better perks than a viking hat, I’d be throwing money at you guys). Elo visibility is really nice tho, kinda only thing that keeps me and my friends around. Just a tip, elo games tend to not show opponents’ elo in the pre-game screen so that it won’t affect in-game tactics (i.e. 3v1, etc). Really looking forward to an update and hopefully adjusting this rating. Thanks for your hard work!

Single Player is Infuriating. I really need this to better. I’ve literally played 100’s of single player games and my family is tired of hearing my apoplectic complaints about the AI rigging. It seems as if the only way the developers could find to make the AI “skillful” is to rig the dice rolling, card stealing and AI targeting. Don’t have a 5 but, AI does? Guarantee it will roll off the hook. Have eight cards? The robber will almost always roll. AI will trade with each other, even against their best interest, but almost never trade with you (half the time they’ll have resource monopoly and steal back what they traded). Seriously, I could go on and on about how this teaming and game advantages are bestowed on AI. What makes no sense though, is AI decision making which can be random and ridiculous at times. Is there no way to make AI smarter and then balance the randomization? It makes this game infuriating and uninteresting. I win games all of the time that I would probably lose to humans, and I lose inexplicably to miracle dice roll runs that defy probability. Uggghh!

Glitchy but worth it. My friends and I used to have “Catan” nights often for our game nights. Now that we are in Covid crisis it’s been a nice supplement - and with all the practice I am getting much better at the game strategy. However it is a very glitchy product. Once I reached Level 9 and went to switch devices and the game forgot my account. I literally tried to reset my password and no matter how many times i attempted to reset I got a “this account does not exist” message. I believe it because I was able to make a new account with the same user name and my fiancé still has my old account as a friend but the name changed to John Doe. My fiancé also had issues with logging back into his account after changing passwords and we had to reach out to the support email. From the online community it looks like there have been a ton of issues but I still find it worth playing because it is free and kills time. Because of the glitches I would not invest in the full game. Maybe if the support team gets it together I will reconsider but for now the free version is enough for the hassle.

Mostly good, a few bugs. I play mostly against the AIs. The experience is good, but now and then it’s frustrating. The AIs seldom trade with the human player and very often only trade between themselves. Furthermore, usually they only trade on trades they initiate and very seldom on trades that the human player initiates. The human player can offer a trade that gets rejected and the AI that follows will make the same trade. You can select AI difficulty levels like rookie, veteran, or master. however, the master level seems to rely more on board, set up and dice rolls than strategic gameplay. The master AI often benefits from repeated rolls of seven and its resources, as well as being favored in trades that the human player also accepts. I wish the master AI displayed more strategic gameplay skills, rather than relying heavily on favorable dice outcomes, board setups, and trades. I play against the AI to learn ways to improve my game, but if it’s designed to make, the master always win through favorable outcomes instead of strategy, it’s frustrating, rather than educational

Perfect solution for isolation from fellow Catanians. As more and more of my family and friends are exposed to Catan, it is becoming the perfect solution to playing together long distance. I really don’t have much else to say except it provides a near exact representation of the original game in a virtual format. However, note for the app developers, there have been a few coding changes over the past 6 months that I feel could be improved: For example: Incremental numbers that are added or subtracted, such as the number of cards or roads you have in your posession, are being calculated and displayed BEFORE the visual annimation of the cards or roads is being applied. Although this does not change the end result of the calculations, it does cause some visual confusion because it quickly calculates your numbers, and then you watch the cards come and go, but the numbers stay the same because they already changed. Is it possible to adjust the order of the coding to allow for the calculations to take place AFTER or more in SYNC with the visual animations?

A great game gone wrong. I love Catan. This app has all the right ideas: great layout, art design, and more. The free option is really good, though I wish I could play more than once every 12 hours. I would gladly buy this game, but unfortunately it’s not worth it. If you’ve read the other reviews you might see issues with the AI. It’s crap. There’s no point in playing master AI, the novice ones seem to be able to play at that level. Random generated dice? It doesn’t seem that random. I’ve probably played at least 100 games so far. Too often what happens is that every number you’re not on is what gets rolled. Let’s say you’re on 8 but not 6 (6 is rolled more often) and vice versa. I’ve had amazing games where I start with 3, 4, 5, 8, 9 (or similar). And yet, 6 and 10 become the hot numbers that game, sometimes occurring consecutively. I’ve had games where 2 has been rolled 4 times in a row. I just played a game where I was ahead by 6 points, and then the AI “somehow” got these amazing rolls to come back and beat me by 3 points. Until they fix the dice and AI, I would just stick to the free version. If you buy the game, then you’re still going to have the issues they were having now

Love it but , expansions need some upgrades. I love the visual representation of the game. It’s fun and addictive! Lots of great options for play. Good graphics. Some things take a bit to figure out because there no directions on them but if you know the. Base game it’s fairly easy to figure out. The base game works pretty well the only thing I would suggest is being able to kick out those with weak connections or have the kick timer at 30 seconds and a limit on how many times it can get activated. Additionally, when playing ( and I love that you can live play against others and also just vs AI ) but against AI two will steal from you even when you have less points than both of the Ai’s. I would also like to undo selections when discarding cards. Sometimes I hit the wrong cards and you can’t undo your selections. I would like to see the bugs with cities and knights fixed. I love that game but my settlements will disappear. Lately it will crash my city when the barbarians strike even though I have an active knight to cover it. Sometime it will roll. Resource I’m on but not give me the card. I also had one game where the 7 was rolled 28xs.. need a cap on that, it was like 3x any other number. I would also like to be able to pause or recall when my cards get stolen or another player does something that effects my hand so I can see what was lost. It will go so fast I don’t even know it’s gone. Overall I really love the games and the Ap! I play it all the time.

Terrible terrible app. I love catan and have been playing for years. I’ve begrudgingly played with this app over the years dealing with the constant bugs and issues because it’s basically the only option. After hundreds of hours of play I finally reached the rank of grandmaster. That’s when the development team decided to migrate their servers. I’ve come to find out that my account has been lost in the migration with no option for recovery. The support team first told me that my account never existed. After I found a screenshot of my position on their leader board, their solution is for me to simply create a new account and start over. What an absolute joke. They have made it very clear that there is no way to adjust the ranking of my new account. You would think they would of backed up and recorded the leader board ranking if this was at all a possibility during the migration. What prompted me to write a review is that I just launched the app to create a new account and it’s so buggy that I can’t even do that. Keep up the good work dev team!

Good game, but could be a great game.. I get it that in order to provide a variety of gameplay, the numbers generated are not random. (For example, the dice roll the number shortly after the robber is placed on it.) I particularly don’t like it when a number (includes high probability numbers) doesn’t come up in the first 20 rolls, sometimes not once in a game! And funny thing, it is almost always my number for wood or brick, so you are way behind! - NOT Fun! And I don’t like when a ‘7’ is rolled right before I can go out causing me to give up a winning hand only to lose in the same round by an AI team getting its number come up TWICE by its turn and winning the game! That sure doesn’t feel random. there should be an option to play using a truly random number generator. When playing multiple AI opponents, the programming feels like I am playing four teams written by one programmer. 1) the initial placement of settlements seems like at least one team will block me despite poor placement for itself; and 2) one or more teams will make trades that don’t serve itself well - something no human would willingly do. (There is usually a team with only 3 or 4 points at the end!) Each team should be programmed to win on its own. - NO Alliances among AI teams! (Unless I can play two or more teams to match the AI.) Make a few programming changes and this could be a great game!

Really buggy and doesn’t follow the game physics right. There are a lot of issues with this game that would be really easy to fix if the developers cared to try. The board doesn’t set up right (the actual game rules specifying the numbers be put in a specific order) so you end up having areas with 3 6’s and 8’s bunched together which makes the game impossible for anyone who doesn’t get that spot. There also aren’t the proper ratio of development cards meaning there’s just as many monopoly cards as years of plenty as knights as road builders as whatever else which just makes the game extremely frustrating. As for bugs, the main ones I’ve noticed were one that covers up 2/3 of your screen so you can’t actually see the board and one that doesn’t let you place your starting pieces so it then auto places them in terrible spots. Otherwise the game is okay but a bit more frustrating than the real game since you can’t talk to the people face to face.

Several bugs. I love Catan, and play this game almost daily. I’ve paid for the original game and mostly play the classic map with the computers. The trading aspect is almost entirely broken, where the computers skip my accepted trades or trade after doing other actions. I’ve also had problems with logging in, where resetting the password goes nowhere and times out without anything happening. I usually select play without log in and it gets to my profile no problem. The most recent glitch being an error message saying Client version too old, despite having the most recent update. I’ve paid for the base game twice on two different devices and have had the same problems all around. It’s extremely disappointing considering I may have to make a third account and pay for the game a third time if I want to continue playing, which I really don’t want to do. But since it won’t reset my password or let me into my account I don’t know what else to do. Definitely a lot of bugs that aren’t being addressed.

Add ability to mute group chat. Some players are really aggressive and question you and harass you every time you put a robber on their spot; use cards to steal their resources, etc. That is what you are supposed to do! It’s the game! It’s worse in the basic game than in Cities and Knights. People use really insulting and offensive language. It’s really upsetting. It just means that I play on single mode most of the time. It ruined trying to play with others for me. Please make it possible to just block group chat. It’s so unnecessary anyway. Also, most of the trade offers I accept from AI characters simply disappear or go to other AI players so fast. That’s really frustrating. Also, the robber just comes up too often. That’s annoying, but it shouldn’t come up during the first round when you’re trying to build knights. Lately the first round has also been going by way too fast and most players lose their cities. The last issue is that a robber will land on your spot and many times that number will roll 4 or 5 times in a row while the robber is on that exact number! All these things combined take the fun out of playing. Thanks!

This isn’t a good game. (Editors note: I love the board game but I’m talking about the mobile game for this but I love the real life board game) I was only able to get one game in because for one: it doesn’t even let you build a settlement for me and only roads so I have no way to win the game. 2: the AI’s always get the advantage and everyone else has said things already for me. The dice are clearly not random and the dice always go bad on my end and good for the AI, and how you said your fixing the game? I don’t believe it. The game is obviously super glitchy and broken and don’t waste your time playing this game it’s honestly is a bad game and I have only played a bit of a game and everyone else has already been saying bad stuff for me. This game is honestly super buggy and glitchy and I already deleted it within a hour or so of first getting time of playing it. Honestly I can see why they have so many bad reviews and I agree with each one that says bad stuff about the game. And luckily for me somehow the game was free for me so yeah luckily it was and a good thing it was too Becuase this game is horrible

Rigged play makes it annoying. Update: the dice rolls aren't too bad now but my cities are only paying out 1 resource instead of 2 so it stills feels impossible to get ahead. There's nowhere in the app to submit issues with the programming. I tried the free version for a few days and it was fun so I bought it. I haven't even come close to winning one game since I bought it. It seems insane that the dice rolls are hitting 5s 3 out of 6 rolls in the AI's favor. Every 2 turns it benefits me but the rest of the rolls alternate between my opponents getting resources or them getting the robber and placing it on my hexes and stealing from me. One turn 3 of the 4 opponents rolled a 7 and moved the robber around all of my hexes stealing from me. Also, none of the AI will trade with me even if I offer up to 5 cards in a number of combos to get one card. So I'm stuck trying to save up to trade but magically when I finally get enough to do what I need a 7 is rolled making me throw out 1/2 my cards. They had an outage to upgrade the system at the time I bought it so I'm not sure if this is the paid version or the new "upgrade" but it makes playing the game feel pointless and annoying since the dice rolls and all the opponents team up against you.

Sticking w/ Catan Classic until Stack Mode Improved. I tried this again after all the improvements since its release when I found its gameplay far too slow compared to the Catan Classic app. I really wanted to like it given the community potential w/ guilds, chat & ELO and the gameplay was much improved but its "Stack" mode is too limited for competitive play IMO. You can't activate "Stack" mode unless you invite a friend so it’s not even an option for your usual quick auto-match games & even if you do the implementation of "Stack" as explained by the Almanac is far worse to the simple but effective "Full Stack" & "Stack minus 5 random tiles" options from Catan Classic. What's even the point of tracking ELO in a game driven completely by RNG dice roles??? Probability is a central aspect of Catan and Cities & Knights has ample strategic depth but all of that is wasted when you can't normalize the dice rolls to some approximation of expected probabilities via decent "Stack" options. Me, my potential revenue & all the friends I recruit to play will be sticking w/ the Catan Classic app until Catan Universe supports "Stack" at least as well as that very old app :-/

Inconsistent enforcement. I feel like this game has potential. But there’s several glitches and no way to report them or get help. There’s also “tournaments” that you can register for-but never get accepted into. There’s also clans-but they are pretty much dead too, even the 200+ ones. There’s the inability to really customize some of the rules but that’s okay. Lastly-the dice rolls are beyond random. Every single online match there are the same dice rolls 4x+ in a row but others get ignored entirely (for example 6 gets rolled 4x in a row). Odds are that this will happen at some point. But it happens way too consistently for it to be tolerable. Here’s some example of the glitches. 1-Seen bases placed one space apart. 2-there are times it won’t allow a base to be placed when opposing roads lead up to each other, but other times it will. 3-the harbor master doesn’t always get filled, have had a city and town on ports with no points given. 4-bots can offer trades on your turn but you can’t do it? I paid for the expansion to enter into tournaments which was a mistake. Can’t enter tournaments, deleted the game a few days later.

Fun, but buggy. I love Catan, and the ability to play so many game modes and expansions in this app is fantastic. But the game bugs out a lot of the time. I tried to purchase the premium version, but it was too bugged to play, so i asked for a return. Sometimes the game keeps me from building some things, or spending certain resources. The 12hour token regen to be able to play a game makes sense for the free version, but when I have a token to use, i usually have to close the app a few times before it will actually let me start a game with it. Often times it just resets the timer when i open the app, which is frustrating. The Barbarian function in cities and knights imposes inconsistent city destruction rules - taking out defended cities and leaving undefended ones. Unlike the boardgame, the app allows NPCs to build settlements at owned intersections. And even the “balanced” dice mode leads to drastic uneven roll distributions. It would be nice to have a more accessible list of special rules for the special game modes. The cities and knights additional cards from dice rolls is also inconsistent. The additional rules are tough to find, and seem to be missing some observed mechanics.

Catan App. Love that i can now have Catan on my phone so I can play wherever I go, overall a great app! Only minor critique here as a long term Catan player, the trade options are limited, like you can’t counter offer and that’s a pretty big oversight, you also can’t offer trades to players when it is not your turn, also would be nice if there were pre set dialogues that you can use like Catan online used to have, and the messaging option is only accessible by going into a screen separate from the view of the board, maybe that’s not a big deal to some but it would be helpful to see the chat on the board screen, and last, my only big gripe with the app is the obnoxious angles, I often get stuck at a really awkward viewing angle and I still sometimes can’t get it to show a top view of the board, I mean it’s kind of cool the board view is interactive but it really is more of an annoying feature, if they could add some controls to the view that would be great or just eliminate it altogether, anyways it’s cheap so can’t really say it’s a bad app just needs a few renovations and it will be supreme!

Someone needs a statistics lesson. Funny, when I play this game is real life I hardly ever see the number seven rolled 27 times in a game that had only 80 turns. That’s every three turns for those doing the math…. Anyone who downloads this app will surely notice some seriously suspicious patterns when it comes to the dice. The above example is not an outlier. Seven is rolled entirely too often - sometimes several turns consecutively - and usually happens coincidentally when you’re leading a game by several points. Suddenly, you’ll find yourself going a dozen turns in a row without collecting anything and having all of your items taken away from the robber, because obviously they always put the robber on one of your positions. Just as an example, the last game I played I clearly had the strongest positions on the board. I was winning by several points. Out of the last 24 rolls, I counted the number eight was rolled 6 times in 8 turns alone; seven was also rolled 6 times. The numbers I needed in order to win (6, 5, 4, or 10) were never rolled. The developer might argue I’m just being a sore loser but those statistics are virtually impossible and it happens constantly in this game. I could go on and on with examples like these. I should note that there is another setting that allows you to change the probability of the dice but you will find it is just as goofy as the default setting. Not sure what the point is in making the game so obviously skewed in favor of the computer.

Frustrating. A lot of things with the ui are not intuitive. It took three of us some time to figure out how to build a road for example. We’re long term catan players. We just couldn’t figure out the ui. I’m not too mad that the base game costs money, but why make it a pain to buy? I have to jump through several hoops and buy gold (how do you earn it? No idea. Hubs and I played a game, he won, I came in second. But I had gold and he didn’t. I don’t even know how I got the gold.). And where in the app do you find the purchase game option? It’s buried in a weird spot! Also several bugs. The AI is EXCRUCIATINGLY slow. Why on earth would anyone want that? And the sliders to change their speed are locked. I thought buying the game might unlock them. Nope. Spent $5 for nothing. I’m spending soooo long waiting for a turn at a game I’m playing by myself! And there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it! It’s nice to have this game as an option during the pandemic, but ugh it’s frustrating as heck! Ps is there some reason the AIs won’t trade at all with me? Am I doing it wrong? I played a game with friends and we traded ok, but nothing I suggest gets responses from the AI.

Obviously rigged. When playing the AI (especially of “Master” difficulty) it just happens to be that the robber is insanely lucky to be on your best resource for the whole game. Try to buy 1,2,3 development cards to get a knight to move it? They will all just happen to be road buildings, monopolies, victory points. When you finally get a knight, within 2 more turns a 7 is guaranteed to be rolled so that the AI can put the robber right back on your resource. Then a 7 will not be rolled for probably 25 turns as long as you dont play another knight. But once you play a knight to move the robber off, its guaranteed to be back on in only a couple turns. Also if you have 8 resources there are very high odds of AI rolling 7. Im pretty sure catan just cant come up with an AI that is actually good enough to beat a skilled human so in order to make it “hard” they need to adjust the luck of the game. What is worse than this though is when your resources magically “disappear” from your hand. Several times when I get robbed by the AI i have seen the resource that the AI took from my hand disappear and then about 1 second later another resource just disappears from your hand too (no 7 rolled or knight played). No explanation for that. You could at least do a better job at hiding the fact that the game is rigged. 👎 Also when playing multiplayer 90% of the time a 7 is rolled in the first 2 turns and then not rolled again for a long time. Not saying its rigged but just very annoying.

Randomize the dice. I love Catan but this game is frustrating. I played free for as long as I could stand it and finally made the switch to get the random board and a couple of the add ons (cities and knights/ harbor master). You can have great board placement with all the right resources and lots of good numbers and no matter how many roles you are getting nothing. When you finally get a couple roles and just get over 8 cards a 7 roles. Meanwhile other players with terrible placement get the same number rolled 4 out of 5 rolls. I’m competitive by nature but this really needs to be fixed. Dice are random but certain numbers should show up more. I just played half a game and while the other players had two or three settlements, I had one road and bought a development card to stay below 8. I just needed two roads from the beginning of the game to move past another player. He is going the complete other way one his other settlement, I then finally get the wood I need for the road and he blocks me. I start the road to go around and on his next turn he places 3 or 4 roads to block me again, without a road building card. Please fix this and make the game about the board placement like it is in real life. Also when is the tournament play supposed to be added?

Used to love this game. I downloaded this game because I love Catan. There were some features of the game that I did not like (when playing online with other humans, the board never changes. You also have to wait 12 hours before you get a new sun so you can play with the AI players and you have no option to purchase more suns. Also, the dice is not randomized. If you are on a 6 or an 8 hexagon but do not have any on a 2,3,4, etc. expect to see those numbers rolled significantly more). However, I continued to play because as I previously mentioned, I love the board game. I even had all of my friends download it. Over the weekend, the app would not let me open it because it was “outdated”. I went ahead and updated it. It now is saying “find running game” and NEVER loads no matter if I am on WiFi or not. When I try to start a new game, it takes my sun away and makes me wait a whole 12 hours before I go through the same process all over again. I have not been able to play in days and I doubt I will get to play again unless the developers fix it.

Fine but could be so much better. This does the job but it seems like they stopped short of putting much polish on the game. There are almost no audio/visual cues when something happens. Other players can place new buildings, etc and you won’t notice unless you’re paying extremely close attention to your screen the entire game. I also wonder why you have to choose from static game boards. Why can’t the tiles be completely randomized? The biggest problem though is the opponent AI. They really easy to beat even on Master level, they make nonsensical decisions regularly, and sometimes one of them will take half the game to score a single point. You can play online of course, but it’s nice to play with AI players who don’t take forever to take their turns. The Xbox 360 version of Catan had better AI if you can believe it. I have no idea why this game is about 2/3 of what it could be. It’s fine and we enjoy it, but it’s obvious there’s only so much replay ability here when it could’ve been almost infinite.

Version too old - Update not available. Update: I posted this review and miraculously, there is suddenly an update. I am changing my 1 star review back to a 4 star review. Same as everyone else, Since late last week you cannot get in to the game. I upgraded IoS and that seems to be when the problem occurred. I sent a ticket to support, no confirmation it was received or is being resolved. Best time waster game ever, but worthless if you cannot use the app. You cannot play online, and you cannot play in the app, so therefore it is not a game at all, it is an annoyance. I tried reinstalling, and that did not resolve it either. If you love Catan, and have not updated your IoS, don’t update until these guys put out a bug fix for the problem. Otherwise you will be like me, trying over and over again hoping the problem is fixed, and being disappointed each time.

Please add these features:. Love the game! Very well done! To any developer reading this, I would like to make a few requests: please add another expansion (I would pay another $5 for easily) that adds another ring of resource tiles around the basic game board. Just like the expansion for the board game in real life. That way the play can edit the basic game to have more players, victory points needed to win, more trading ports, and development cards into the pool. Also please add support for Co-Op for two players using the same device in a game. Possibly even up to 4 players on one device? I would also like the ability to play with only 1 other CP in singleplayer mode instead of requiring 3-4 players. There is also a bug that has happened quite often where the check mark does not work in trades with CP’s and forgoes the trade no matter if you click on the red X or the green check mark. The bug also does not allow you to properly re-negotiation the trade with CP’s. Last but not least I would like more edit features when generating the world map instead of only having a few preset “scenarios” to pick from with their own hidden list of possible resource hexes. Thank you for reading and I would love your feedback!

Computer works against you. Really wish the dice roles were actually random, it just ruins the game. Nearly every game just favors the computer. If you have settlements on high probably numbers they basically never role, and anytime you have over 7 cards you get hit with the robber. Computer can literally have +15 cards for like 3 hands, ranking them in somehow from 2’s and 12’s but as soon as you hit 8, boom robbed. Not to mention the cards you do get are useless. Anytime I get ahead on points it’s impossible to get the cards I need to win and finish the game, and you have to watch the computer magically get everything and gain +5 points in like 3 rounds while you just keep getting sheep until you are over 7 cards and then you somehow role 7 every single time and have to give everything away. It’s programmed for you to get close to that win, and then it just somehow slips through your fingers so you keep coming back for more. I read some of the reviews and thought people complaining about the dice roles were just people upset they were losing, but after playing multiple games I completely understand it. I’m glad I haven’t wasted any money on this app and only played the free version because it’s really disappointing.

Purchased Gold not showing up. I love Catan and I love the app, but I’ve genuinely hit a wall here. I paid $27 for 3,000 Gold, (the in-game currency) and my Gold balance never changed. My intention since downloading the app in the first place was to get every game extension to play every scenario with no restrictions at any time. But after paying top dollar, I am still restricted to playing a lousy 1 game per 12 hours, and the only multi-player option available to me is the repetitive base game with no chat function. I reached out to the customer service email provided by the Catan Universe website. It’s been a whole week, and other than automated response emails, I haven’t heard back at all. My Gold balance remains at 0, and I cannot get the features I want from this app. At this point my review SHOULD be 1 star, plus a report for blatant theft. But I’ve enjoyed Catan Universe so far, and what it has provided me despite this. The Free-to-Play aspects are still perfectly fair. I have faith in the people, and assume that my email must have fallen through the cracks during the holidays/weekends. I’ve submitted another email for customer service. Please, CU Team, find a way to program that gold into my account, or allow me access to the extentions etc. I don’t WANT to be refunded, I just want to buy your game. Please don’t be a scam! 🤞🤞

Too buggy and rough AI. It’s decently fun to play online but if you play against AI it feels rigged. The game actually includes a dice roll feature but, say you have a settlement on two 6’s. Those two 6’s will rarely get rolled then a robber will get put on it and like 5 in a row will be a 6. So, the bell curve is somewhat realistic by the end but the actual turns those numbers are rolled on is stacked against you. Clever way to cover for AI that can’t compete against a human naturally I guess. All that aside, its still pretty fun but its actually unplayable at this point. For about a week now, the app just won’t load. Originally, I would try to play and it would reach the main screens but after I clicked the play button it would just say I was out of suns every time (even though I wasn’t and I tried on 3 different days w/ no success). Online mode would just say “this feature is unavailable while offline” but my internet has been fine and all my other games function normally. I deleted and reinstalled but now it just perpetually loads on the sign in screen. I’ve tried logging in, registering a new account, and playing without an account but nothing will load. I’ve tried on wifi and LTE. I’ve tried using a VPN to mask my IP address. Nothing works. What’s the point of an app you can’t use?

Great game, horrible developers.. I have never experienced a game with so much glitches/ bugs ever! It’s sad because it’s such a great game! My family and I used to always play the board game in person. Since we live I different cities we were all so excited when we discovered we could play this online on our phones! That excitement quickly became anger/frustration when we realized it’s almost impossible to set up the game to play with your family/friends online. Always get an error message when trying to invite a friend from your friend list. It was just a nightmare. In about 6 months we were probably able to make it work just a few times. Every time an “update” would come up, we were positive and thought maybe they had fixed that issue, but NOPE, same problem as ALWAYS. If you want to play with family/friends online, do yourself a favor and try Colonist io. I discovered it about 2 weeks ago-download it- asked my family to download it-created and account- added each other as friends- and guess what? It actually works. No glitches/ bugs/ error messages/ lost communication with server/ nothing like that. Just fun playing with my family. You can become a member which unlocks more maps, modes, etc but it is a bit pricy (monthly payment) but I personally think it is worth it as it connects me with my family and allows us to have some fun. We play it all the time now. Sad these developers have never been able to fix that issue.

Years later and still no fix: save your money. I can’t believe I paid $15 for this app that barely works. At least every other game there is a game-breaking glitch like randomly resetting everyone back to the start or kicking you even though you are not running the timer down. As others have mentioned the AI often breaks and will make the same offer again and again for sometimes half an hour. Also I was skeptical about people criticizing the dice initially, but after playing for a while I definitely think the rng for this app is awful and not realistic at all. I intend to start keeping a spreadsheet to see just how far from expectation the statistics really are. To make matters even worse you can see reviews talking about the same problems for YEARS back and people saying the developers are “working on a fix”. How long does it take to find a fix when you are charging people $15 each just to play the expansions?? The developers should be ashamed of themselves. I have played other multiplayer apps that were free or a fraction of the cost that ran MUCH smoother than this train wreck of an app. I am so disappointed. I feel ripped off. I want my money back. DO NOT BUY.

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Great game when it works, but buggy. My wife and I are both really enjoying this game, but every so often it goes through a period of bugginess. Often this means losing contact with the server (I think) which means that you might be in the middle of a game and then that game is lost. So two or three or four people‘s time is wasted. Unfortunately, with the new update to Catan Universe 2.01, you cannot even login any more. How is that possible? Surely this has been tested before release. Or is it amateur hour for the Catan Universe developers? We both play on iPads with the latest operating system as of November 2020.

Bad Connection. Really getting sick of being kicked from games because the app fails to stay connected throughout the game. I have 5G internet and none of my other devices/games have issues, but this one constantly drops connection, kicks me from the game for running out of time, and then gives me a lower rating for not completing games. Love the single player options, but so far multiplayer is barely playable.

Love the game but….. Fell in love with the game again and after a few tutorials, I figured it was worth the buy. However as far as I can tell there is no perks to having paid for it at all. Still have to wait for the “suns” to load and I can’t play it offline. I can still play the seafarers expansion pack despite not buying it (and any other expansion pack) which is great but there’s no perk for buying the core game in the first place. Playing for free is exactly the same game play as if you pay for the core board game 🤷‍♂️ dunno how that works. So I would love it if having bought something, there's no limits on it like the free stuff. And that you can play it off line as I want to play while travelling. Cheers 👌

Disappointing. It all started so well when I first installed this and games were fun and even but now the AI seems broken. AI players team up (even if one of them looks to be running ahead of the others) and sadly the dice are heavily rigged in favour of the AI players. Last game before I uninstalled it was a classic example. Somehow was allowed a good starting position and had to sit back as the AI players rolled four whole rounds of 4s and 9s (the only numbers they had to themselves) and 7s (to steal produce). By the third time around it had become a bit of a joke. Seriously, good game adaptions (see “Ticket To Ride”) have skilled players who you can watch and learn tactics from. Bad adaptions like this bend the rules to cover poor decision-making by the other players. Save your money and buy the board game. This is poor.

Unplayable. I was willing to look past the clunky ui. Tutorial seemed to work great. I got this to play with three other people. We couldn’t start a game with more than three people without buying. That is okay I’m happy to support devs, we all purchased the main game. Then it would not show me that it was my turn multiple times. It just had the previous player’s loading sign. If I exited and rejoined it would work for a time before happening again. Would avoid this product if you’re looking to play games with friends in isolation.

Frustrating. I only play AI but find it a bit frustrating as the “AI” seems to modify the die roles so that its unusual to have a close game - you either win big or lose big. Without fail if you dominate a number it will be least rolled which is annoying. In addition, depending on what level you set the AI opponent (eg, master, beginner etc) that just increases the likelihood of the AI just committing suicide to block you at set-up or just put the robber on you irrespective of who’s winning the game.

Trash Algorithm. Beyond all the bugs already mentioned in the reviews, the game play is lazy. Designed to ‘keep you playing as long as possible’, not to reflect real dice rolls. This is true for both multiplayer and singleplayer. In multiplayer it is apparent that the ai decides on a preferred winner at the start, and the loads towards them. In singleplayer, the ai will largely just ‘cheat’. Random nice rolls in excess quantities that only benefit the ai etc (I just had 8 twos roll in a row, when only the ai was on the two). Similarly the ai will sometimes accumulate up to 30 resources (and yet no 7 is rolled), whereas as soon as the human player hits 8, *Bam* a 7. Fix the game please, it used to be enjoyable, but sadly the enjoyment has been lost. Would give a lower score if possible.

Horrible. This app is the worst program I’ve ever encountered. Haven’t been able to finish a game yet, without either myself, the other players being booted, and the game cancelling. One time the game just decided there were no human players left so it started playing all our turns for us. The algorithm is disgusting only prioritising the numbers over who is actually winning on numbers. I would get a more fulfilling game if I played it in real life with my cat. At least then I could understand why the player left the game.

Good but issues. To play the game you have to spend $7.99 on the base game once you’ve downloaded it so it’s not free and then the expansions cost more. I got the base and played it was fun then for some reason now when I open the app it says “find running game” and doesn’t load the base game. Says I have to buy it again and the button doesn’t work. Plus there’s no restore purchases button. Please fix!!!

So much potential but just a big disappointment. This could be such a great game but it’s just utterly frustrating. The dice are rigged and the AI players gang up against you. I can tell from the start of a game which numbers will be rolled most frequently by the tiles the AI players have chosen. Sometimes it can be a common number like 6 or 8 and sometimes it will be a 4 or an 11, but it will always be whatever the AI players choose and I haven’t. Or my number will be rolled but only after the robber has been placed on my tile - then it will roll 7 times in a row. It’s so predictable. I give up - what a waste of time!

Disappointing. Downloaded game hoping it’d be an improvement on the classic app but it’s sadly not. Big bugs in the game. Anytime I accept a trade with the AI it wouldn’t actually make the trade and the AI would offer me a new trade as if I never accepted. Seems like something based unit or functional testing would pick up. The interface can also be clunky and unintuitive. Feel like this game hasn’t been built well or with a proper plan. Graphics are the only improvement over the “classic” apps.

Alas I have become a 3 star reviewer. I love this game but the glitches are so annoying. I’ve noticed lately you can only play one game then it’ll time out and say “finding running game” so I’ll have to delete the ap and reinstall it. Otherwise the graphics are the best and love all the different game variations available.

Okay... but could be great. I downloaded the free version to try before purchasing the full game. Unfortunately, the dice are loaded and do not function according to the usual statistical model. For example, when playing the computer, the computer player’s numbers will come up regularly- much more than would be expected - even numbers like 2 & 12 which have a low probability, or the 7 will come up multiple rolls in a row, or as soon as you have more that 8 resources. Also, computer players will seldom trade with you. It makes this far more a game of luck than strategy. Unfortunately, I won’t keep playing due to this. The idea of the game itself is great.

Iffy. Love the game. When it does work, it plays great. Have had small connection issues in the past but still about to play and enjoy. Have hit a wall now with the app now not allowing me to log back in and notifying me ‘your app is out of date’, but according to the App Store there are bo new updated available 🤷🏼‍♀️

Unplayable. If I could give zero stars I would - I’ve paid money to unlock the extra features of this game and there have been numerous occasions where the glitches prevent playing. Most recently the ‘find running game’ glitch caused my profile to reset and all paid features to be lost. Do not pay money for the extra features of this game as you won’t be able to play 99% of the time.

Freezes quite often. I love the game and have played with friends however it freezes midway through the game probably with 1/10 games. It’s really frustrating as sometimes you have been playing for a little while and the time has been wasted. Not awesome when we have paid for the upgrades. Please fix

!!! WARNING DO MOT BUY THIS APP !!!. I bought this app and then bought the premium version “gold” which you need to to be able to play the full game which is not cheap like $23 and it deleted my account and basically said that I needed to rebuy so to buy for a second time I spent at $23 just to play the game which is almost as much as the physical board game and I emailed CATAN customer Support weeks ago and I’ve emailed several times to follow up and they haven’t responded. There are hundreds of post similar to this all across the Internet talking about this app which is a scam do not buy it’ll be a complete waste of money. I don’t know how apple allows this to stay up when it’s clearly a SCAMMMMM.

Worth every penny, I’m addicted. The only drawback is that they haven’t really done tournaments since Covid but the gameplay is great, simple, designed well and easy to manoeuvre on an iPhone. This app takes a great board game to the phone and there’s always players available. Get on it

Can’t trade and can’t build ai is retarted. Won’t let me build settlements when I have over the amount necessary also the ai only trades when I can’t use what I get in return because it knows what I have also the concept of the sun being your energy bar is retarted because you have to wait over 24 hours to play a single player round where you have a 1% chance at winning and online matches you have 0.1% chance of winning don’t install this just get the board game

So much wrong. Hate to write this as it’s fun playing Catan online but... I’ve lost so many games because of the game bugging out. There’s so little indication of what to do I.e. I couldn’t activate knights because there was kick timer on another player but I didn’t know that until later so no knight activation and we all lose our cities. Just dumb. What do I care if there’s a kicktimer on another player it shouldn’t stop me from playing my turn. I lose ‘karma’ the rating system based on not quitting games, because the game says I’m offline when I’m at home on good wifi and I get kicked from games I’m winning. Bad karma score no one wants to play you. Everyone almost every game gets an offline message and the game thinks it’s worth putting up a warning in the middle screen that obscures the game every time this happens. And the message doesn’t go until you touch it so you’re constantly having to dismiss warning messages. And if it’s like my offline messages - incorrect - then it’s just a whole mess of wrong. A pity cause it could be so good.

Amazing Game Must have app. This is a perfect replacement for on the go catan, I have hundreds of hours played into the game with my partner and will continue to play. Download asap! Hope the developers. Keep updating the game and bringing more things to the app

Game has severe issues. I think I speak for everyone when I say this game has gone downhill. We pay to have the game and can’t even access it 90% of the time. Trading with bots seems impossible as they skip the players and trade with other bots. So many glitches, bots are able to take MY resources and use them as their own. Most recent issue is nobody can even log on! App says “you need to update” but there is no update available. Server maintenance nights seems to do more damage than fixes. I used to love playing this game, now it’s impossible and frustrating

This game is virtually unplayable since the update. I don’t make a habit of writing reviews but when an update is THIS BAD I have to. I started playing this online recently and spent my hard earned cash on the base game and expansions for something to do while in isolation. Was great until you decided to update and absolutely ruin the playing experience. I am losing ELO because the games freeze and there’s no option but to quit. Pleeeease revert back to the previous version and spent a bit more time fixing the glitches.

App is super buggy. Crashes or freezes on a player way too regularly. It’s still worth it because Catan is such a great game and being able to play people across different devices is good. The UX takes a bit of getting used to—non-intuitive and confusing. The computer AI isn’t very fun to play against as it’s easy to beat even on the hardest setting and makes ridiculous choices. The app isn’t cheap so I feel the developers needs to do a lot better to stabilise it as currently they should be pretty embarrassed to be honest

Too many bugs. Almost every game that I play, despite having adequate active knights, my cities are destroyed. Also, every single game I can’t trade about 75% of the time, because the AI characters glitch and trade offers last Millie seconds before there removed. Even if they stay long enough for me to trade, half of the time my trade is ignored and it goes to the next turn. My Wi-Fi is fine, I have updated the app, I’ve deleted and reinstalled, logged off and back in again. No dice. I’ve reached out to developers with recorded evidence and they haven’t responded. Maaan, this is so frustrating! I really love this game but if fixes aren’t made or devs continue ignoring my requests I’ll have to delete the game before I throw my iPad out the window!

Frustrating and disappointed. Love this game however wish the constant ‘crashing’ of the game could be sorted. It’s so frustrating having to constantly restart the app when it crashes I the middle of the game. I can’t even get it to work now since I updated last. I make it to the home screen and that’s where it crashes every time. So disappointed..

No where near as good as catan classic. I played this for a day and now im going to go back to playing catan classic. The board is hard to look at, you cant clearly see what everyone is doing and in order to see everything properly you have to slant the board or hide the players details which are important to see for strategy reasons. The trading is fiddly. Matching up with other players is so much harder if you want to play a specific map or game style.

Glitches make this game unenjoyable. My friend and I love playing this game however the glitches have made it unplayable. Every second game it will glitch out. Bots either continue to spam the same trade with their turn timer resetting each time or the game seems to rubberband, allowing you to make a turn but then kicking you out of the game to come back to where you were before your game. Competitive play is compromised due to the glitching. I try to put up with the glitching until it resolves itself however it never does and I have to end up leaving, reducing my Elo. Well designed app however not functional.

lovely game, but i hate how it penalises my ELO whenever the game bugs.. Really nice game to play and I’ve purchased a few expansions, however it is full of bugs. I’ve had 2-3 games crash midway where it states “rejoining game” and then “all players have left and the game is closed”. After which my own elo is penalised and deducted just because the game itself has crashed??? it had nothing to do with my wifi (it’s always full bars when this happens) and I did not click out of the game at all. please fix this because i feel it is very unfair.

Great!. But wish it would have a score summary. Sometimes the game ends and you can’t work out what they did to score the required points. There is a totals screen but that just shows road length, knight attacks and total points. So you have to add up cities and special harbour points or which ever yourself. 😖

Buggy but potential. I’d like my money back. The app is full of bugs, it just logged me out of my account in the middle of me playing a game, which means I’ll be booted from the game and I’ll be penalised, despite it being the app malfunctioning. After paying for the base game, have discovered the frequency of 7s rolling is so disproportionate it makes the game almost unplayable a lot of the time. It seems like a glitch or something but all players are experiencing it, it’s ridiculous. The styling and gameplay itself are quite good and has a lot of potential, but right now is too frustrating to keep trying to play, especially after having spent money on it. Also, like other online versions of Catan I’ve played - a lot of very aggressive people playing who get abusive in the chat almost instantly. Really unpleasant, but the app creators can’t be held responsible for that.

Not able to play anymore after the latest update. I have waited 4 days for the latest update to be completed and migrated to the new server, was extremely excited to get to play again but I guess I could never because I have been stuck at “Hand shaking” and “Searching for Opponents” & “Map null properties not found” Is this the end?

Buggy and regularly down. This app would be great if it didn’t take up to 20 minutes to get it to connect to a multiplayer game. When it does it often gets stuck with the ai and you have to start again. It’s always down and for example the last two days it keeps saying “ClientVersionTooOld” when I try to log in. Same for my wife. Nothing online about this and rebooting etc has no effect. I’ve tried everything. Reinstalling the game has worked in the past with buggy issues but not this time. Soooo frustrating!

Glitch after glitch….. Don’t waste your money - it doesn’t work properly… it forced me to use their password and I cannot change it. It doesn’t remember my log in. When I use their password it logs me into the random game with the same ppl (that are not actually there) and to leave this game I have to loose karma… and after all of this it still doesn’t find ppl to play with - I think ppl abandoned this game. I don’t blame them. Zero stars if I could.

This app takes the fun out of Catan. I love playing catan and enjoy having the freedom to play it on my phone whenever I want. However, this app is absolutely terribly designed and makes it infuriating to play. You have to pay in order to get the full game and even then 3/4 of the time you are forced to play on the same beginner island. The developers have no common sense and even the most intuitive concepts such as displaying buttons which are used to perform actions in the game are done terribly. I have been to the official catan forum with issues on the game multiple times and the customer service and admins on the forum are terrible and offer very little advice. The advice that they do offer is often advice which instead of answering your question and satisfying you, makes you wonder what the hell was going through the developers minds when they created this. I recommend you download this app if you are fine playing the same map over and over again but do NOT spend any money of it as it is a poorly designed game and they do not do refunds.

Love the game, always play it but these login issues. Love the game, easy to play, cheap and got nice UI, but every time there is an update you have to restart login and half of the time, there is an issue. Really makes you reconsider your will to update. Apart from that, I would love a 6 players option but I think it would be a challenge !!

Stop deleting suns. So I jumped on to play a round today; got through the motions, get my game setup, my sun has renewed which is great. Then it pops up with a little message about getting 10 free suns; well that’s cool but I’ll do that later when I have time. So I click continue and it cancels my game and takes my sun and takes me back to the dashboard. I try to enter the game but there is no such game. Please stop taking the suns for no reason and leaving the player with nothing to play. I really love this game but I’m nearly ready to delete it because it’s just so infuriating.

Recent update has broken the app. Have been using this app on our iPad for a few months now and it was great with minimal glitches. The app recently underwent a substantial update which changed the look and feel of the interface and since then it hasn’t worked at all, shutting down regularly and not allowing you to progress in your game. I’ve also now tried downloading the app on mobile which didn’t work either. Not sure how else to get the feedback to the developers but something has gone very wrong with the recent update and it would be great if they could revert or fix it!

Very disappointing. Unfortunately the developers rather than using good programming and logic for their pc based players use the rolls of dice to disadvantage the human player/s. If the programmers spent some time to program the game properly, they could overcome the requirement to have to do this. The developers claim they do not rig the rolls, however if the computer based players are that lucky, they should be buying lotto tickets! EVERY game I watch the dice rolls carefully, every game the non human players do not roll 7 while they have more than 7 cards, as soon as it comes to me rolling with 8 or more cards it happens more often than not. It should only happen one in six times! Last two games I played it happen 3 times then 4 times in a row, a mere 1in 316 or 1 in 1896 chance. This just makes the game rigged, frustrating and plain sad. It doesn’t even deserve the one star I have to give.

Connection issues. Catan as a game is most enjoyable. A number of issues reduces the enjoyment of playing the game through this app. One issue is with the dice. As soon as a robber is moved to a number, that number appears almost 80% of the time on the next throw. More prominently there are connection issues that appears in every game. If you don’t mind this frustration, it is an entertaining game.

Multiplayer Still Broken. Last update helped but there is still frequent disconnections and big game roll backs. 3/4 games don’t complete, especially with longer variants such as City and Nights and Seafarers. Developers - please fix as its a great game otherwise. Can I also suggest that you give the player the option to continue the game with all AI, if everyone disconnects? Full game costs quite a lot of money, so it’s pretty unacceptable the current unplayability.

Excellent game :). I am running on iphone 8 plus and looks great, plays very well. The AI is more realistic in this one and the dice algorithms seem more realistic. Also the visuals are impressive and moving the board around while finicky is excellent. The one thing i cannot workout is how to share it with my family. I make the majority of app purchases in the family and we have sharing on, but i can’t get a second device to access what i have already bought as additional apps, other apps allow me to restore purchases i can’t see it in this one... can you please advise if i need to buy all packs and expansions on each device?

Should have read all the recent bad reviews before buying …. Title says it all. Bugs and faulty AI and to top it off, can’t get ANY response whatsoever (other than the auto response) from the “Support” team on a password reset request - not sure who they are supporting, because it’s definitely not me and I have been waiting for weeks ... Stay away from this until they get their act together. But given the feedback - I suspect that this is unlikely to ever occur.

Bot trades. So frustrating when you play against the bots, they never accept your trades, they always favour trades with the other bot, trade offers disappear before you can accept them and when you do press the green tick to accept them they still don’t accept your trade. Bots will always trade with each other before they trade with you and then will win the game. Too frustrating, the game needs to be fixed.

Find running game. This app worked pretty well for me until about 4 days ago and now it’s universally hopeless. I can’t access any games and am just stuck with a message “finding running game”. If I log in and out I can usually get into one game but as soon as I go to another screen and come back it happens again. This is on AI single player games I’m not even trying to be matched in a multiplayer! Useless for what’s a pretty expensive app to get full access to.

Love the game, however…. Very glitchy, play on both phone and iPad. Often freezes for no reason on both devises. Timer for live games needs to be shorter than 90 seconds. Often won’t allow me to login to play for hours and then suddenly it will. Crashes and games end without warning. Needs a bit more testing before release.

Great game but not optimised for iPhone mini. The ui is too large for the iPhone 12 mini. Also sometimes text is clipped. Also I play against the ai and blue decided to build a settlement which broke my road, grey then had the longest road and went from 8->10 points and instantly won the game. Please improve the ai in this Regard as they’re on master difficulty.

Sooo frustrating. This game has so much potential but is driving me crazy-it is fun til it freezes or glitches which is nearly every game. Other players say it is the same for them so not a device issue. iPad, pc, same deal. Such a shame because I love playing it and it would be such a good game if it worked reliably. I see another reviewer has said you can’t see what is happening very well but I find the graphics fine. It just has lots of problems with working! Nearly every game a player has connectivity issues and is replaced by a bot and if the game continues for a period without freezing it will usually stop working near the end. When it’s frozen on me I’ve tried reloading and that works sometimes but most of the time it still doesn’t work and boots me out. Please work on stability or there’ll be no one left to play. developers, You have done a great job setting it up now I hope it can start to work reliably

Technical Issues in multiplayer mode. Love the game! Especially the physical board, since we want to play at the comfort of our own home, we got this game. However, the game seems to have server issue 1) Input Syntax troubleshoot: while trying to invite friends 2) The game keeps on lagging and failed to reconnect at time. I assume its the server issue. It would be great if this was fixed :)

Great when it works. This app really struggles to function in iPhone. Currently, I’m perpetually prompted to update the app, even though the App Store states that I have the latest update. When it is “updated”, I am logged out every single time I open the app. More often than not, it crashes, which is only annoying because when I open the app, I need to log back into Catan Universe. It’s a shame because the game is great but the app is barely functional- and having paid for it is more frustrating.

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Brutal,. If you enjoy sitting down to Catan this game will ensure you throw your phone across the room. In order to ensure difficulty level it rolls numbers that the computer has so you loose. The programmers need to be fired.

Lost my purchases. Lost access to my account when they switched servers. 2 weeks later and they still can’t fix it, I’m not repurchasing the game plus all the add ons.

App does not work. DO NOT BUY.. They tried changing their servers and absolutely destroyed their app. No reason to purchase app at the moment, server issues have been going on for well over a month.

Tutorials don’t load. When I try to do the seafarers or cities & knights tutorials I just get stuck on a losing screen that never loads. The rest of the game is fun but I’d love to do the tutorial (which the game recommends) before jumping into the game mode which I have to play to unlock single player.

Dice Rolls are not good. This game is great but the random generator for dice rolls seems off

Pls go back. Ever since your migration the playing experience has been beyond terrible. You need to fix it or revert back to old server structure.

They stole my money. Garbage app. Garbage app. Only steal your money. Don’t play or buy!!!

awful. game suddenly just stopped and did not continue. i tried clicking in every single button nothing worked and i just had to quit the game. awful experience. not recommended to download and such a waste of time

Horrible customer service. Developers migrated to a new server and since then, game is unplayable. Instead of rolling back to the old server until issues are fixed, they continue to attempt to fix the new server. Down for over a month now, time for refunds. Do not buy this app!

You’ve seen the other reviews. -Can’t load multiplayer -have to keep resetting password -keeps logging me out Overall have not been able to play a single game since the update. Would avoid paying for it like I did 🤦

Game broken do not buy. Game was working well and was my favourite. But they switched their servers on 1 November which they said would require a shut down of two days, and now no one can play in online games. Recommend buying a different version of the game.

Glitches Constantly - Do Not Buy. This app will log me out every few months and tell me my password is incorrect. Then, I’ll go through the Forgot my Password process, be sent a code, and THAT won’t work. I’ve contacted the company a few times over this issue. I wouldn’t waste your money on this app you will rarely have access to.

Can’t play since the server migration. Ever since they migrated the server, I have not been able to play a single game (I think this happened in October, it’s now December and nothing has changed). Do not waste your money by buying different game expansions, you won’t be able to play them. It’s too bad since I played this game quite a bit before it broke! ):

Tutorials won’t load.... ... they just hang at the loading screen. And you have to do the tutorials before you can play properly. So i can really play unfortunately. I see others are having this problem as well. Is this being looked at?

Migration of new server. This app was working perfectly fine until the decided to switch servers. The app quite literally does not work anymore, and has not for the last month and a half. I love this game and loved the app, but what is going on now is frankly unacceptable. I have never seen an app unusable for this amount of time.

Great game when it works. Doesn’t work since migration to new servers. Sad to see this app so mismanaged

New update doesn’t work. The new update deleted my purchases and I have to sign in every time I use the app. The game glitches if the screen goes dark and I reopen it. Before the update the app worked great.

Good bye Catan. It’s so sad because this could be an amazing game, but with the countless constant glitches and crashes and freezes , it makes it impossible to play. Why publish a game with so many problems is beyond me! This was my fav game, after installing their update it wouldn’t let me play. They said they were going to fix it and over 1 month went by and still nothing ! I’m majorly disappointed with these game creators! I believe they need to take serious look at their entire game and the fact that they are probably losing hundreds of fans. Not impressed guys, I made it so far and bought expansions only for the game to stop working. I would say fix your game and make it free of like all the hundreds of glitches before you ever put it on the market.

Pire app ever. Rien ne fonctionne! Aucun retour de la compagnie et aucun remboursement

Crashes on iPad & doesn’t work on browser. Catan 2.0 is a disaster for the following reasons: - shows what card was stolen from other players - app crashes on iPhone and iPad - can’t see dev cards being played by other played - load time on browser is long - Game is filled with unnecessary UI changes eg emoji and unnecessary camera zooming The essence of the main catan game is gone with the new update. Save your money and do not spend it on this app.

Find Running Game Error. The game has been great most of the time, but for the last few days it won’t load and I get an error saying “find running game error”.

Non-functioning garbage. 3 weeks after updating, online play is still impossible. DO NOT PAY A CENT with this game.

Cannot play multiplayer. New version has broken multiplayer. All of us are on the new version, we can invite one another to a game, but the game won’t start. Please fix this asap

Game does not work. Their servers are all messed up right now, unusable app

Update is not good. Does not let us play in a friends match. Continues to tell us that one of us is ‘in a match’ when we are on the main screen. The app before the update was smoother.

New version sucks. Ever since they moved to a new server I am unable to login to my paid account. I keep trying to play at least with the free version which 9 out 10 times do does not start or freezes after 1 min of playing. Very disappointing:(

Catan universe HORRIBLE. I used to love this game until they switched to a new server. Now the game is unplayable. It lags, you lose connection all time time and it takes forever to even find a multiplayer game. HORRIBLE

12 hour reloading time. Regeneration after 12 hours I won’t let me play another game. The times up and just won’t let me activate anther round of the game. Kinda feeling ticked.

Used to be great. Game used to be an amazing free game now I can’t login or create a new account and everytime I play as a guest it crashes. Used to be great with these crashes, 0/10.

What have they done!!!. It is outrageous how you can scrap such a nice game. First, they change servers. Since then, it simply doesn’t work anymore. Game jams, and when you are furtunate enough to finally joining a game, it blocks and you can’t play in time so timer expires. You get error messages that pops up in your face when joining a game, etc… but even before, graphics are ordinary, you have very limited number of scenarios and they force you to pay for each of them. It just sad that Asobrain has stop exploiting its online game. I am now back to the board game.

Nothing works any more. The game is so fun, and the app was great until this recent upgrade or whatever it is. Now nothing works.

Do not purchase. The game platform/server is messed up. I haven’t been able to compete a game In months. It will kick you out or time you out regularly. Was cool and fun now it’s garbage, a waste of money.

Bad Performance. Server always down. All kinds of trouble starting a game. Brutal!

DO NOT DOWNLOAD!. I bought the expansions bundle for $20 now I cant play at all. Kicks me every time I try to play join a game, I click the checkmark icon and immediately the game crashes every time now.

Useless. Can’t do anything right. Every update they create 10 new problems when the update was only to fix 2-4 problems. So they go one step forward 7 steps back, they could fall in a barrel of tits and still come out with a dick in their hands..

Unable To Invite Friends. Latest update (2.3.4) can no longer invite any friends to play, it says they are currently in a game (they aren’t). Running on iPhone 12, iOS 15.6.1

Game is unplayable!. This app is a joke... It’s impossible to play. You lose connection all the time for no reason. Haven’t been able to finish a single game Tutorial is busted... just loads. Even the steam app does the same not just mobile app...

Infinite freeze. Paid for the full game. Was playing multiplayer. Tried to build a road and it crashed. Every time i open the app it tries to rejoin that game but cant and gets stuck on the loading screen. Have closed/deleted etc... the app but nothing fixes it. save your money

Server migration broke the game. Impossible to play after the server migration, can’t even load up a game without people randomly getting kicked off.

App not working after upgrade. Hi Catan Team, request you to please refund the money. App doesn’t work as earlier. Zero rating for this app. Regards, Siva

Horrible UI/UX. I’ve played the regular Catan app for years now and never really had any complaints about it. The online gameplay didn’t work well but I didn’t use it so it never bugged me. Catan Universe is a dramatic departure from the look and feel of the original app (called Classic now, I believe). I’m sure it took a lot of time to make these nice 3D objects, but the gameplay has taken a serious step backwards with regards to usability. What once took 1 or 2 taps now takes 6 or 8, and information that I care about is not easily viewable. It feels like a designer went nuts and made things way too complicated. The UI for trading is horrible. It seems I can’t offer multiple of one card to somebody, and the buttons clog up the screen unnecessarily. The overall game board screen is cluttered with icons and buttons and it doesn’t help me. The menu for building has been removed in favour of hovering game pieces that appear when you can afford them. Dragging them to their new location on the board is an awkward experience, and it just doesn’t feel like I’m purchasing these things. Buying development cards has been hidden away until you can afford it too. It appears as a transparent icon over the game board when you can purchase, adding to an already cluttered screen. This is just to name a few bizarre UI/UX decisions, but I’m thankful I have the original Catan Classic app to play — Catan Universe is an app/game I would never decide to play.

Do NOT pay for this app. Although the initial app had its bugs, at least it worked. This app has not worked in two months! They claim to be working on it, but progress is nowhere to be seen. FIX THIS! DO BETTER Catan! At least don’t let anyone else PAY for this app until it works!

Too much stealing. The game play is great but when playing against AI the amount they steal my goods is completely unrealistic compared to playing IRL

Fuyez pendant qu’il est encore temps. bien apprécié le jeu quand il fonctionnait correctement, on a même payé pour avoir accès en tout temps. depuis le changement de serveur rien a faire on ne peut plus jouer. on est même pas informé de rien, j’ai été patiente mais là ça commence à faire long (on parle en mois maintenant non en jours) et surtout n’avoir aucune information des développeurs sur ce qui se passe ou le temps que ça va prendre, alors que l’on a payé c’est un manque de respect total.

Used to be good. This game used to be amazing but in the last year they’ve done updates that make the game unplayable. Worst money ever spent since I can’t even play a custom match against a friend due to nothing loading properly

Migration. since migration to new server, multiplayer doesn’t work. Various error messages pop up.

From bad to worse. This game was bad but at least you could play it, since the update its absolutely impossible to play. I want my money back

DOES NOT WORK. Give my money back. Since I’ve paid for this app it hasn’t worked at all and it’s been months. These guys are scammers. Apple needs to intervene, having a broken app on their store like this is disgusting

Servers dead. They took everyone’s money then killed off the server. Been 2 months now no Catan.

App closes when i place my first settlement. Game keeps crashing constently, kicks me out of games im close to winning....this doesn’t make sense, fix it or refund me please

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Super fun, good rendition of the board game, but there are some quirks. This is really enjoyable and you don’t have to pay anything to be able to play and experience all the types (you only get to play the expansions once if you don’t pay for them, but at least you can “test drive them”). The tutorials are good with one exception; the one-on-one tutorial is almost non-existent. Lastly, for some reason, on this game, you can build between someone else’s roads. It was my understanding that you could not do this on the board game, but you can here. All in all, this is a well done app that you can play with family and friends who have their own account. Oh yeah, to be able to play, you don’t have to pay but you do need to set up an account to play with others. Happy Settling!!

Hope you change the developer to other. Log in process looks like really random. Mine works fine but one of my family members can’t login. Tried tons of times to change password. Even we typed the new password inly one time, but it shows ‘typed wrong three times and blocked’ We spent an hour to figure out but still can’t login. I was exciting to play with all my family members together during this pandemic, but… I really exhausted just to do logging in. Now I’m facing all family members look disappointed. === Dear owner of the Catan app, I’m seriously recommend you to switch the company who developed the app to other company. As I know, the Catan Universe first appeared in 2017, but the app never ever worked smoothly so far. And still have the same issue during the most important process - on boarding process. I bet you are really losing tons of potential gamers because of the very poor/non-reliable on-boarding process. No improvement for 4 years? Seriously? I just bought/played Monopoly app. The on-boarding process was smooth and even register/login doesn’t require at all to play with friends. Hope you learn something from it. I love the Catan game itself but I would avoid any apps that the developer created. Really bad company. === Also, regarding the dice roll. Yes, as many people said, I also see it’s actually not random. The dices are controlled by a certain rule.

ATTENTION - PSA. Do not download this app, Do not give this game any of your attention, and Do not give this company your money. The multiplayer gameplay is VERY glitchy and regularly experiences bugs. Furthermore, the gameplay is often rigged against you. In a game, the roll of the dice is supposed to be completely randomized and unpredictable. However, on this app the outcomes are predetermined and manipulated by an algorithm. In many cases, the algorithm is intentionally rigged against you and the operating system doesn’t even try to be subtle about it. Whether you win or lose a game of Catan is often largely determined by “luck”, or statistical probabilities that are dictated by 1. your Building placements and 2. the roll of the Dice. Given that, finding yourself in an Online game of Catan where your Outcomes are deliberately manipulated AGAINST you makes for a painstakingly MISERABLE user experience. Seriously, if you want to play Catan… please find any other app or platform than this one.

Could be so much better!. I love Catan, I could play endlessly! However, I have several complaints about this app. The dice rolls are very unrealistic—when have you ever rolled so many 7’s in real life? And since when do you go an entire game without rolling a 5. And how is 12 getting rolled more than 6? The turn timer when deciding where to place your first settlements could be a little more generous. It’s tough to think through placement that quick and if you miss one timer, you’re kicked out. I’ve leveled up to level 22 which earns me orient pieces, but trying to use them is a waste of time. First of all, the graphics for the orient hex’s are terrible, but worse than that… the game glitches when trying to place initial settlements if I have orient game pieces or orient hex’s, so they can’t even be used. Yesterday while playing, it had me marked down as an ai player (with the robot icon next to my name)! I could do about half of the turn actions, but the game just skipped/glitched the other actions. Also, the game log is a cool feature… I like to look back to see who robbed me so I can return the favor 😉 But trying to go through it is difficult. As the game play is continuing in the background, the game log jumps around as new actions are added, making it very difficult to trace through what has happened.

Password reset does not work and Customer Service does not respond. I switched phones recently so I needed to re login but it wasn’t recognizing my password. When I tried to reset, the app did not move past the terms and services agreement. Ok, so I created a new account. All was fine and I even upgraded to an expansion pack, which I paid for. Then this week I was logged out of my new account. Not sure why that happened, but when I tried to reset my password, same issue. Even locked me out after a few tries. I wasn’t going to create a new account this time because I have the expansion so I emailed customer support. That was three days ago and I haven’t heard back. Stand behind your product. EDIT: they got back to me this morning and informed me that it is a known bug and that I can reset my password on my desktop. That resolved my issue, but that is a critical bug that seems to have been around for a while. They should prioritize it. Upgraded to 2 stars.

I love Catan board game, but the mobile is riggee.. Im a big fan of Catan as a board game, and I have played Catan mobile at least 1000 games so I think I have a credibility to write this negative review. Im sure all of you learned some level of probability in school. When you roll two dice, obviously 7 has the highest probability, followed by 6 and 8, then followed by 5 and 9 and so forth. Now of course this doesnt mean there is no chance of rolling 2 or 12. Of course theres always a slim chance of rolling these rare numbers. But the more you play catan mobile, the more you will realize that the probability distribution is different than you think (the catan mobile programmer can deny this message but again i played over 1000 games and this just does not make any sense). I think its better to give you an example so say the game rolled 10 five times, 6 three times, and 7 twice, and lets throw in 12 once. Then the probabilty distribution is now constructed such that 10 will have the highest probability of rolling, followed by 6, then 7 and so forth. Throughout this game, 10 will roll a lot more than 6, 8, 5, 9. This can be a coincidence, but if this happens over and over again, i dont think this can be a coincidence. The game also needs to fix the AI. AI keeps targeting players who have ore or wheat resources. Thats how its prioritized. It doesnt look at which player has the highest point.

still hangs up, now no recovery. Now the crash remedy of exiting, closing the App and re-entering to continue the existing game seems to have been removed. For years these games hang up occasionally (at least the 1 person ones, because they never fixed keeping properly track of sequencing between game action and user input. So every once in a while it gets stuck waiting for an input by the game or the user that cannot happen anymore because another action was already taken. Without the remedy of crashing out and then continuing the existing game (which wonderfully always continued from before the hung up state), the game now is just lost. If you used a sun to get it, that is just lost too. Looks to me you (inadvertently?) turned a somewhat buggy (but good) game into an act of occasional theft. Why not actually fix the bugs instead if fiddling with the graphics and the interface? And why not bring back way to continue a started one player game?

Single Player is Infuriating. I really need this to better. I’ve literally played 100’s of single player games and my family is tired of hearing my apoplectic complaints about the AI rigging. It seems as if the only way the developers could find to make the AI “skillful” is to rig the dice rolling, card stealing and AI targeting. Don’t have a 5 but, AI does? Guarantee it will roll off the hook. Have eight cards? The robber will almost always roll. AI will trade with each other, even against their best interest, but almost never trade with you (half the time they’ll have resource monopoly and steal back what they traded). Seriously, I could go on and on about how this teaming and game advantages are bestowed on AI. What makes no sense though, is AI decision making which can be random and ridiculous at times. Is there no way to make AI smarter and then balance the randomization? It makes this game infuriating and uninteresting. I win games all of the time that I would probably lose to humans, and I lose inexplicably to miracle dice roll runs that defy probability. Uggghh!

Don’t waste your money. I don’t understand how you can have a phone app where you have to pay to play only for it to start glitching and games can’t end. I have a game now that glitched out getting close to the end and will now not load back in. My friend and I both are stuck with the same problem. We can’t even leave the game to try and restart. The whole app is essentially bugged out on a loading screen. I have deleted app and redownloaded and it still goes back to the old game that is glitched out. I’m glad to know I bought a game that I can’t even play the game or use the app at all now. There is also no where to email a support team or anything for help with this happening. Save your money and just buy the board game. I would be more than happy to change my review if this can be taken care of… but no where to reach out for help when this happens. Very scammy with how it’s set up right now and especially how this is the main issue with this app looking over other reviews. Lazy game developers that don’t want to fix their bugs = less and less game play.

Same glitches as 5 years ago. I want to like the app because I love the board game, but it only works about 20% of the time. The other 80%, it has the same glitches making it unplayable as it had five years ago. I check in every once in a while to see if it’s gotten better, and these continue to be a problem after all this time: 1.) AI trade is broken. AI will offer the same trade 10+ times and it doesn’t matter how you respond. You can accept and they’ll just offer again. You can reject, they’ll just offer again. And they have no turn timer, so it just goes on and on until you have to block trade and hope the system ends their turn eventually. 2.) if you leave the app and re-enter (e.g., to reset the trade issue), it often resets your board. Suddenly you’re back at the very beginning, while I guess the rest of the players are still playing somewhere else and you’ve become AI in their game? And then you’re stuck there until you quit, taking a Karma and Elo hit. 3.) Dice are loaded to roll 7’s when people are over, or roll numbers blocked by robbers. It isn’t random. 4.) Lag. Every dice roll, every card draw, every build. 5.) Game gets stuck on certain turns for other people. Then there’s a lag switching to your turn, so by the time you can play, your turn is halfway over already. Sometimes the graphics improve, but the gameplay doesn’t.

Version too old - Update not available. Update: I posted this review and miraculously, there is suddenly an update. I am changing my 1 star review back to a 4 star review. Same as everyone else, Since late last week you cannot get in to the game. I upgraded IoS and that seems to be when the problem occurred. I sent a ticket to support, no confirmation it was received or is being resolved. Best time waster game ever, but worthless if you cannot use the app. You cannot play online, and you cannot play in the app, so therefore it is not a game at all, it is an annoyance. I tried reinstalling, and that did not resolve it either. If you love Catan, and have not updated your IoS, don’t update until these guys put out a bug fix for the problem. Otherwise you will be like me, trying over and over again hoping the problem is fixed, and being disappointed each time.

Awesome Game, Terrible Implementation. I’ve been playing this game for 6 months now. I loved the board game and I thought it would be fun to play and get better. I’ve played a couple online custom matches with friends but I mostly play offline. Initially when I started playing I thought it was great. Couple bugs (when clicking on the info button the messages often don’t fit the screen) but playable. After I paid the $5 to play unlimited the issues with the game started to appear: 1) The AI refuses to trade most games. In a full game with four people the total trades is less than five. 2) The dice roll after a seven is rolled is nearly guaranteed to be the number the robber was placed on. I’ve actually seen people use this as a strategy. 3) The dice distribution is so bad it’s disgusting. I just finished a game where a four was rolled more than an eight, nine, and ten. I don’t expect a perfect distribution, but there are far too many issues with this (as can be seen by all the other reviews). I even went into the discord group to make suggestions about changing the dice algorithm and was pointed to the “card stack” mode (I tried this already), which is somehow just as bad. The developers actually want this uneven distribution. It apparently allows for a more random experience, but it’s not like the actual game at all. Overall, I enjoyed the game for a couple weeks just enough to pay the $5 for it and now despise it so much I’m writing a critical review.

Really buggy and doesn’t follow the game physics right. There are a lot of issues with this game that would be really easy to fix if the developers cared to try. The board doesn’t set up right (the actual game rules specifying the numbers be put in a specific order) so you end up having areas with 3 6’s and 8’s bunched together which makes the game impossible for anyone who doesn’t get that spot. There also aren’t the proper ratio of development cards meaning there’s just as many monopoly cards as years of plenty as knights as road builders as whatever else which just makes the game extremely frustrating. As for bugs, the main ones I’ve noticed were one that covers up 2/3 of your screen so you can’t actually see the board and one that doesn’t let you place your starting pieces so it then auto places them in terrible spots. Otherwise the game is okay but a bit more frustrating than the real game since you can’t talk to the people face to face.

Not worth pay to play. If the app were free I wouldn’t mind, but considering I actually paid for it, I expect it to be better taken care of by the developers. I got the app to play with my wife, and nearly every single time we try to play there is some glitch that occurs and makes us have to restart the app entirely, or even lose the game we were playing. It is not user-friendly and is incredibly cumbersome with the way logging in for online play works. Again, if this were a free app, not a problem. These kinds of issues would be normal for a game that doesn’t make much of any profit. But when I pay for an app I expect higher quality than this. I know how popular Catan is — everyone we know has the board game — and I have an idea of how many people have PAID to download the app. There is plenty of money to make an app that works better than this👎🏻 Make the app cheaper or free, otherwise fix your software, please.

BE CAREFUL! (Updated). Update1: Well, once we’ve recovered the option of resetting the password, I really enjoy the game. Will leave it at 4 stars right now. Expensive in app purchases. I bought one of the expansions because that’s the only way of playing against computer generated characters. If not you have to play against human opponents and some times that’s not convenient (wanting to be able to pause the game half way through, for example). Well, after a couple of days, the app asked me for my password. Of course, I didn’t remember and I still don’t remember. I use 1Password and Apple own password storing “app”, but I didn’t this time. Anyway I had seen that they had the option and assumed that I could always reset my password. WRONG!!! They have the option, but it doesn’t work. I wrote to their support email and they told me that the reset password option doesn’t work and there’s nothing they can do. So long story short I just lost $10 and they’re not willing to give me any solution. I find terrible that an app that asks you to pay for some of its “services” in 2018, doesn’t have a functioning option to reset your password or something similar. Yes, I know I should remember my password and that’s my bad, but every other app with the need of a password has a reset password option that actually works. That’s why they ask for your email and a bunch of other info.

Cant get a roll. Everytime i think I'm doing good, i go 4 to 5 rounds of nothing hitting my numbers. Ive even managed to have settlements on over have the numbers on the die and still nothing. Im big on strategy and I’ve played this game many times, its like i get cheated out of my win every time. Somehow the numbers that never get rolled are rolled repeatedly, i could never get what i need until i use the resources for something different so i don't lose them on the 7 then boom the next roll is what i need. It got to the point i started writing down the numbers on paper so i can see how many times a number has been rolled and in what order. 7s are rolled multiple times, more than ordinary, once 6 times in a roll like really. It’s supposed to be computerized rolls and its not even random. Its a fun game but those dice need to be fixed. I don't want to win every time but again when I'm in a good position to win and somehow a person with 4 comes back to win the game with less placements than me is beyond me.

Glitches with the new version. Here are a few glitches we discovered last night when a group played the new app version on iOS. Initially one player could not log in even with resetting password. During the game, the dice roll statistics were not formatted properly. Only dice rolls 2-6 were displayed on the screen with 7-12 not visible. There we’re also I believe connectivity issues. Each one of us experienced a situation where we could not pass the dice or take an action. Only after cycling through the different menus, did the game allow the player to pass the dice. One item of preference, we wish there was a way to turn off the “water droplet feature” that appears around a settlement/city when you place it on the board. Overall though we still really enjoy Catan Universe!

Stuck in “rejoin” for days now. This app has so many bugs. It kicks you out of multiplayer games often. Now it is not letting me play at all. It kicked me out of a game earlier and now every time I try to login to play it spins with “rejoining” at top of the screen and won’t let me do anything. I’ve tried deleting the app, and downloading again. Also tried hard reset of iPad. Nada. Still spins rejoining. I love playing Catan so do often and i have buggy stuff happen in about 33% of my games. Sometimes it doesn’t recognize cards I have. Especially if I steal them from rolling a 7. Also has made me give up settlements in nights and cities game when ship hits even when I had an active night. Happens way too often. Very frustrating. I emailed the help link once and the response was arrogant and rude. I needed help logging in. The guy said “if I helped everyone I’d be doing this all day” as if I was bothering him. I’m disappointed in this app.

Junk app for a great game. Dropping from 2 stars to 1 star. For the past 6 weeks, every time I play a game… to get a 2nd game going, I have to uninstall and reinstall the app. Otherwise it hangs after the start request. Won’t proceed at all. I’ve let the developers know, they claim to be aware of it. But they sure haven’t fixed it. ————— The free version allows you to play one game every 12 hours. Not particularly generous, but ok. Except it rarely works. Past few days I can get the game starting music cue, but then the game never actually starts. So why not buy the game? Well.. I tried. Spending real cash for in game currency so I could unlock some of the game modes and play at will. Except they took my money and never delivered the in-game gold. Multiple emails to support got automated responses, but no human ever followed up. After 5 days, I requested a refund from Apple and got it. But seriously, the game developers are awful, and clearly don’t care about their customers.

Great except.... The dice rolling. I’m sure I’m not the first to say so and I’m certainly not going to be the last. It might be the only thing I dislike about the app as a whole, but it honestly leeches the joy out of the game. I find myself prioritizing how I think the dice rolls will play out based on the board rather than good strategy. Is there 8 on lumber with a lumber port, don’t count on 8’s rolling. Just use the inventor card? I’ll put money it rolls whatever you switched out. Robber get placed on your number guarantee it gets rolled immediately after and probably 2 or three times in a row. How bout some stats? I just played a game where out of the first 30 rolls 15 of them were the same 2 numbers. I’ve been playing this game for years, pre the Catan universe release and I’ve enjoyed a lot of it. One of the few apps I’ve ever been more than happy to purchase. But the dice roll algorithm is utterly broken, I’d even says it’s getting worse and it might push me away. Please don’t let that happen. PLEASE, PLEASE fix this.

Love Catan but App could be so much better.. I am a super-fan of Catan. I own the non-virtual original plus 6 expansions and have played the app a ton. I completely support the app but it does have several issues that I’ve suffered through for the sake of my Catan fix. I hope my critique will help the developers. First of all, the game play interface looks nice enough but could be way more intuitive. I like to play on my iPad and I think moving the character boxes to the sides or corners, rather than at the top, would fit everything on the screen better. Having an animation for resource distribution would help players keep track of who’s getting what. The display that shows what actions are being taken should be more prominent. Spending commodities in CaK needs to be more accessible, it’s difficult to scroll down and tap the tiny box to improve your city. Lots of other little things that only made sense after I had played a lot. The main fault of the app are the bugs! I have been kicked out of many games (super frustrating when you’re winning) because the game just gets stuck randomly. I learned a trick to force close the app and get back into the game without “quitting” but sometimes I have to do that multiple times a game just to finish. Again, huge fan of anything Catan. I hope my feedback helps.

This isn’t a good game. (Editors note: I love the board game but I’m talking about the mobile game for this but I love the real life board game) I was only able to get one game in because for one: it doesn’t even let you build a settlement for me and only roads so I have no way to win the game. 2: the AI’s always get the advantage and everyone else has said things already for me. The dice are clearly not random and the dice always go bad on my end and good for the AI, and how you said your fixing the game? I don’t believe it. The game is obviously super glitchy and broken and don’t waste your time playing this game it’s honestly is a bad game and I have only played a bit of a game and everyone else has already been saying bad stuff for me. This game is honestly super buggy and glitchy and I already deleted it within a hour or so of first getting time of playing it. Honestly I can see why they have so many bad reviews and I agree with each one that says bad stuff about the game. And luckily for me somehow the game was free for me so yeah luckily it was and a good thing it was too Becuase this game is horrible

Great app..... While there are some glitches that need to be addressed, this app is a great model of the actual board game. Some people are complaining about the rules, but seem to not have truly ever read the rules. If you are playing the AI on any game/app it basically faults to protecting itself. If you are a true fan of the game this will only make you a better player when you sit to play the actual board game. I own the actual Settlers, Seafarers, Cities and Knights, Traders and Barbarians, Explorers and Pirates games with all extensions costing well over $400. I own both portable version with expansions on my tablet and phone, there was no second purchases necessary for the updated version which seems to be a complaint from others. My friends and I enjoy these apps very much. No I’m not a developer, just a good fan of the game. Great app! Keep improving!

DO NOT DOWNLOAD. If you're looking for a multiplayer board game experience that captures the essence of strategy and resource management, you might want to steer clear of the Catan app. What could have been a beautifully crafted digital rendition of the classic board game has quickly transformed into a frustrating haven for cheaters. Let’s talk about the biggest blight on this game: the blatant lack of accountability. The developers have managed to create an environment where cheating isn’t just rampant—it’s practically encouraged! Players can conveniently disconnect and reconnect, which resets the turn cycle for everyone else. That’s right! You can watch in real time as a player pulls off this stunt to steal the game right from under your nose while you’re left wondering why you even bothered to connect in the first place. It’s infuriating! To add salt to the wound, there is no feature to report a player or report a bug. Are we living in a time where game developers think that players should endure this kind of injustice without a way to voice their disdain? Each match feels like a roll of the dice—except instead of luck, you’re just hoping you don’t get matched with a keyboard warrior who thinks it’s clever to exploit the game’s glaring faults. Who has the time or energy to deal with such nonsense? The core mechanics of Catan should be an enjoyable and strategic experience, but instead, it’s a breeding ground for gameplay sabotage. Sure, you could argue that Catan thrives on negotiation and trade—but who wants to negotiate with a ghost of a player whose only skill is the art of disconnecting? In conclusion, unless you want to put yourself through a gauntlet of frustration and disappointment, steer clear of the Catan app. Until the developers fix these egregious issues and introduce some semblance of fairness and moderation into their game, I’d recommend finding another way to scratch that strategy itch. Trust me, you won’t want to waste your time in this digital disaster.

Decent needs some UI/UX upgrades. Overall the game is quite fun and works well usually. Of the 5 games I played online, one of them timed me out (which damages your rank/karma) in a very tight game about 1 hour in. So that was very disappointing. I don’t really care for the expansions except Sea Farers but those are personal preference. Some areas where I think the game could improve: 1. Slow down the disappearance of resource actions icons (+, -). Icons should stack under the player’s name and the results during their turn and fade during to the next player turn at some time. In other words make the graphical representation of the game log under each player. Things happen and disappear too fast that you can’t tell what exactly occurred without checking game log. 2. Make Tilting the board an easier tap/swipe or a button to press. I can rarely get it to work after doing it multiple times. 3. Be able to replay game log (icon actions) on the actual board game without having to go into the game log which overcomes the board and you may lose out on follow on actions. 4. Allow easier game chat from the board game screen it self. For instance tapping the player’s avatar face and you can start a chat that he/she can see without having to click into game chat. 5. Make simple set expressions or emotes. 6. Allow to prep trades off-turn. This could speed the game up at certain times. 7. Have the cost of items just a click button away instead of always having to scroll to the game reference card.

Good but Rigged. I am an avid Catan fan and love playing, but this app has never made me more frustrated while playing. You will spend most games with a robber on your hex 70-80% of the time whether you are winning or losing, your ONE resource in your hand that you struggled to get WILL be taken from you “randomly” almost every time the robber inevitably lands on you, and a 7 will almost immediately be rolled as soon as you cross over the maximum allowed limit. It has never been so obvious that a game is coded against you than this. Rookie mode is entirely too easy while veteran mode is just a beat down. Haven’t even touched master difficulty due to veteran being so challenging. If you want to practice some strategies then go for it. If you are playing to win and increase your ELO then you are in for a rough and extremely frustrating journey.

Supposed app support email is a bogus address. There is literally no way to communicate with anyone regarding all of the glitches and the unfair “randomness” of the dice rolls. For me, the most aggravating glitch is that I never receive the right amount of resources at the beginning of the game and then per roll throughout the game! It seems like the app developers created the game and then walked away from it. There is no longer anyone manning the ship so to speak. I’m extremely sad to only be able to play the game live with friends. Life is busy and this app was supposed to scratch the itch for a little Catan when a spare moment arises. If this app worked, I would be telling everyone I know to purchase it! As it stands, I tell people not to waste their money or their time on this disappointing app. Do better!!!

Game crashes all of the time. If you play the real board game do not expect this platform to play the same. The game developers can not even create a somewhat realistic dice throw. I do realize real dice throws can not be duplicated but this platform for the dice are unreal. The biggest issue with the platform is that you get kicked out of the system a lot and even more so when you are in the lead. This is not an internet connection, browser or device issue because I have the same result on any device or browser and I have fastest internet available. "Cable Connection" The Catan Universe Support is of no help as they just say the developers are working on issues or they do not know what is wrong. There is standing/levels of ability established as you win games and with the system broken your scores / standing just keeps dropping as you get kicked out of the game where you can not compete and then lose. Good luck trying to have a real outcome until the company decides to hire real game developers. About two years ago they were sending emails/notifications to players if they would like to develop the system. Well, who ever they hired needs to be fired. I can image that the original designer of the board game "Krause Teuber" has no idea how bad the online platform works. He created a great board game that plays wonderful in reality but his developers are incompetent.

Not Reliable, paid player yet can’t play. I love Catan universe - it’s one the best multiplayer board game online experiences ever..when it works. And let me tell you, it does not work often. In 2024 alone they have been offline more months than online. Since the most recent update, a few weeks ago You can no longer player a multiplayer match with another player. This happened earlier in the year for a 4 month span, followed by another 2 month span of having to play a single player game before joining multiplayer. As a paid player this is so distressing. I paid for a game I can rarely play. I would love to support and pay for more, but I knowingly cannot throw money away to play nothing. The devs and customer service are noticeably lacking. They will not take complains in any other form than emailing which entails a standard auto reply, followed by no response and no resolution to your issues. I am not a developer, but that does not mean I wouldn’t find a path forward to more reliable game play. This has been an ongoing issue for years.

Fun for a little but no great overall. The app is a great adaptation of the board game. But the new update really limits your ability to play without spending excessive amounts of money. Your better off buying the actual Catan app. When you do get to play outside of one basic map you have to do so with AI. These AI are programmed very poorly and will even rob themselves over you (even if your winning). Which sounds like a pro-except if you genuinely enjoy the game and want it to be legit. The AIs also have some strange glitches that cause rolls to always be in their favor. I.e. if you are on an 8 (very common roll) and they are on a 2 (very uncommon), I find that it will Still roll a 2 over and over. Leaving you without resources and the AI flush. But most importantly the trade feature with AI is a joke. They WILL NOT trade with you. Even if you are losing substantially and the other AI is winning they will NEVER accept your trade request. Often times you will not even see an offer pop up but see the two AIS trading drastically between each other for the pieces that help them win. I win often (not so much because I am good at the game but I’ve learned the glitches in the system) so this review isn’t coming from a place of angst but rather it’s just not a fun app once you can predict exactly what is going to happen and are forced into games with the AI constantly. The new update makes no sense and I preferred being able to purchase scrolls and play the game as I unlocked it. Time to delete and buy the actual app.

Fun game. This is a fun game to play against friends long distance or just by yourself against the computer. It has a few glitches but most times it’s fixable by swiping the game off and then touching it to turn back on with iPad or iPhone. Just don’t exit and/ or log off and you can rejoin game. The game board is very true to life and can be zoomed in and tilted. To tilt just swipe with two fingers on each side of screen up or down. Took me a little to figure that out. It also gives levels to work towards that gives you the ability to change your avatar or added features. Overall definitely recommend this game but just be patient with newer players that take longer times or you can set the adjustable timer that can speed the turns up.

Unfair rolling of the dice. I never post reviews. However I feel that I need to post on this game. I have enjoyed Catan when I play the board game, or in the Meta VR. So I thought I would try this game on my tablet. This game has a lot of potential however it’s very frustrating when you see the AI guys get ahead with no sevens rolled to take away when they start getting ahead, but I can guarantee every time, every time I have a little bit that I think I’ll be able to move forward on my next turn when my turn comes around a seven is rolled. Always!! Something needs to be done. I understand that sevens are rolled, but not every single time my turn comes up and I’m ahead. I lose everything. Which makes the game very frustrating and I don’t like to play. It’s no longer a thinking game. It’s a well, let’s hope I don’t get a seven exclamation I would rate it higher if it was more fair.

Better, but still buggy. I love Catan, and this app is the most fully-built our version of Catan out there. That being said, it has all kinds of weird UI quirks (e.g. click “I’m not ready” to set yourself to ready to play) and it frequently crashes. I just played a nearly 2 hour game of Greater Catan, and I was literally about to win on my next turn when the app crashed and wouldn’t reload. Of course I couldn’t get back in before the stupid kick timer ran out. The kick timer is especially annoying when you are playing a custom game with friends; no I don’t want your dumb AI to replace my friend who is trying to get back in because your app crashed. Yes, it’s gotten a little better with the updates (oh, did I mention you can’t play custom games with friends if everyone’s not on the same version?) 5 stars for the game but 2 stars for the app’s quirks and bugs. Round down to 3 stars total.

An Interface Mess. First, I want to say that I have been playing for a while and do enjoy the game when it works. Once you figure it out, it’s pretty good. The problem is the interface. There are some extremely weird design decisions in this app. For example, there is a chat, but it’s inside of the game settings. Another is that the countdown for when your round is up is really hard to see. The icons for game stats are just a complete nightmare. This is a bad interface for an awesome game. Also, the game randomly decides you ‘aren’t connected’ and boots you even though the rest of the players see you and see your moves. When you start in Knights and Cities, you are about 50% likely to lose your city in the first round because the game rules don’t appear to be fully intact. Whereas in the physical game the tiles are in an order, this appears to completely randomize tile placement. There’s a lot to work on.

Bot Play Needs Work / Fairer. First off I want to see I usually never leave reviews, ever… I’m only doing this because I think this game is great and it’s issues can be solved. That being said, my biggest issue is the single player mode with bots. Like many have said, they all conspire against you no matter the situation. You could be in dead last and it would still target you the human player. Other similar issues that is the lack of “common sense”. I just finished playing a bot game where one of them had the robber and played it on a number that was 1. Rarely hit on (this was more than halfway thru the game ) 2. I am bias because it was my number, but again, I was not in the lead and the common sense decision was seemingly ignored. I know it’s prob really hard to program fair / common sense robots but it’s been done. Go, famously complex, has done it, chess etc. i do get it though, multiplayer is not the same as one on one but these complaints have been echoed for several years now. As a recent player I assumed it would have been solved by now but it hasn’t. Please focus on developing the bots to a point where it feels fair even when you win or lose. I didn’t even mention the bias die roll but that’s a different story.

“Find running game…”. I absolutely love the game of Catan, and I have enjoyed many hours of single player play in this game. But almost two weeks ago now, this error message “Find running game…” popped up at the top of the screen, and now no single player game modes will load. I can navigate around the menu/profile/settings, but no game will actually load. Nothing has been done to fix this and I see no way to do it myself. Add this on to the terrible multiplayer experience (major bugs with adding friends, etc.), various crashes, times I’ve been logged out and can’t reset my password… it’s just extremely frustrating that such an amazing (and popular!) game like Catan doesn’t have a well developed or maintained app. I’ve enjoyed the single player gameplay enough to not give the app a 1 star, and the game could easily be a 5 star if developed properly and if issues like the one I have were actually fixed. But I’m clearly not alone in having major issues with this app.

A Disastrous Port of a Board Game Classic. I honestly don’t know how they managed to take such a brilliant board game and turn it into this mess. The Catan Universe app is a masterclass in how not to design a mobile game. First off, the UI is an absolute nightmare. It’s cluttered, unintuitive, and looks like it was designed in 2012 and never updated. Want to trade? Good luck figuring that out before the timer runs out. Want to see your cards clearly? Too bad—everything is buried behind confusing menus and tiny icons. The game crashes more than a drunk driver in a demolition derby. Lag, freezes, disconnections—this app has it all. And if you’re in the middle of a ranked match? Kiss your progress goodbye. The servers are about as stable as a wooden shack in a hurricane. Let’s talk about paywalls and bugs. Half the features are locked behind ridiculous in-app purchases. Want to play a proper game with expansions? That’ll be some overpriced “Catan Gold” nonsense. Even then, the game barely functions properly. And don’t even try to play with friends—multiplayer matchmaking is broken or just doesn't work half the time. You'll spend more time staring at loading screens than actually playing. In short: If you love Catan, do yourself a favor and avoid this app at all costs. It’s a frustrating, buggy, poorly designed experience that somehow manages to make one of the greatest board games of all time feel like a chore. Just buy the physical version and play with actual people. It’ll save your sanity.

Game breaking bugs. The game itself is fantastic, but only buy this if you’re ok playing against computers to pass the time. The online experience is unacceptably buggy. Every other match I play ends with either players stalling for half an hour (!!!) and the game can’t figure out that something is wrong, or I get disconnected for no reason. My network will be running just fine, and the game will give me a notice that my “kicktimer” has started WHILE I’M STILL IN THE GAME WATCHING EVERYTHING HAPPEN. I keep coming back to this app, hoping that one day, the next update will finally fix the bugs because the game is honestly so much fun. But I’ve been playing for 2 months now and every match is the same, “flip a coin: you either get to play the game, or the game breaks halfway through and you automatically lose.” Unacceptable in its current state. Edit: raised to two stars because the devs are pretty active in the comments and clearly trying to fix things. It’s nice to see devs that care.

Good game, but could be a great game.. I get it that in order to provide a variety of gameplay, the numbers generated are not random. (For example, the dice roll the number shortly after the robber is placed on it.) I particularly don’t like it when a number (includes high probability numbers) doesn’t come up in the first 20 rolls, sometimes not once in a game! And funny thing, it is almost always my number for wood or brick, so you are way behind! - NOT Fun! And I don’t like when a ‘7’ is rolled right before I can go out causing me to give up a winning hand only to lose in the same round by an AI team getting its number come up TWICE by its turn and winning the game! That sure doesn’t feel random. there should be an option to play using a truly random number generator. When playing multiple AI opponents, the programming feels like I am playing four teams written by one programmer. 1) the initial placement of settlements seems like at least one team will block me despite poor placement for itself; and 2) one or more teams will make trades that don’t serve itself well - something no human would willingly do. (There is usually a team with only 3 or 4 points at the end!) Each team should be programmed to win on its own. - NO Alliances among AI teams! (Unless I can play two or more teams to match the AI.) Make a few programming changes and this could be a great game!

Loaded dice?. Started a cities and knights game against the AI. 90% of the time the rookie AIs will set up their property next to the sixes or eights. This game had one rookie AI set up his city on a 12 and two 4s. His settlement was on another 4. First dice roll, I accurately predicted it to be “4”. Second roll I accurately predicted to be 4. Third roll was 7 but do you know what the 4th roll was? Yeah, that’s right, another 4. We rolled 4 several more times until I got inventor and took a four away from the AIs city. Then it was rolled a lot less. This not uncommon. I’ve seen 12 get favored a lot when the AI has property setup on it. I’ve seen 11 get favored a lot. This is especially true when the AI sets up on double numbers like in the example game I gave. I did win that game, but it doesn’t make it okay to have us playing with loaded dice that favors the AI. I have both Aztec and Special scenarios unlocked, but I am reluctant to buy the other expansions if this game is set up to cheat me.

Clicking small tiles is impossible. Let me preface this: I’m a new player who just wanted to truly get into this game. I had played it once in college, but I never went past that. The board and game were cool, but it was expensive and not many of my friends knew about it. Years later I want to learn the rules and pick it up to introduce it to my awesome younger cousins. Here’s the issue; there very little feedback on your clicks. No “you can’t place that ship there because you need a settlement.” It’s just a poof and you don’t know if you misclicked or forgot a rule. I had one game where I tried to place a ship 9 times in a row, and eventually looked to other strategies. Turns out next turn, I learned I could have placed a ship there like I wanted to and felt like my time was wasted. It’s definitely not as intuitive as joining a group of strangers and having them help me “pick it up as you go.” As a final complaint related to strangers, they would trade with you more often than the AI would. I got so frustrated that I had to let the AI come to me with trades since none of them would accept my 6 card pleas. You just feel against the whole world which is a terrible atmosphere for community driven game that Catan is. This game could have a Civ. Style of play where certain characters would act in specific ways (gunning for longest roads and 4 cities), and I really hope it gets there. Fix the UI and the AI, and I’ll be back for more adventures in Catan.

I want to enjoy playing it. This game is fun, and I’ve just started to play it more often as I’ve decided to try out the different scenarios. But after playing my last 3 games of the scenario Cities & Knights, I’m frustrated. In all 3 games, the minute I started to gain 3-4 victory points more than the AI players, I all of a sudden would stop getting resources…my numbers wouldn’t be rolled at all. This last time, I clocked it and by the time I shut down the game, it had been near 15 minutes since I had gotten a single resource. Do you know how many times the dice get rolled in 15 minutes? And you’re telling me that the 9 hexes/numbers I had just coincidentally didn’t get rolled at all? And I played against rookie level AI players, just trying to see if maybe the higher level AI players were the reason. This has happened the last 3 days. So, to say my interest in this game is starting to wane is an understatement.

Unwarranted unfairness. First off all I must admit that the user interface and the digital adaptation of this game is quite impressive. I’d prefer playing this to the physical board game. BUT after a while it becomes a frustrating experience mainly because of the rigged artificial intelligence. I recall being in several games were when I was in a good situation, the dice would uncharacteristically roll against my favor. Note this happened many many times to be a mistaken impression. Whenever I have more than 7 cards the dice would roll a 7 almost every other time. Whenever I leave out a number like 5 or 9, the dice would roll that ungodly number of times. Its trying to make it too hard too win, which increase stickiness temporary but in longer term it would lead to user frustration and drop offs. Like I quit this game. I play for good time and a fair challenge not to get frustrated.

“Random” Dice are the absolute WORST!!!. I have played thousands of game against the AI on this app and the numbers that come up most on the dice will ALWAYS be the ones you don’t have. When I place my first 2 settlements I try to cover 6 different number to have the greatest possibility of hitting a number on each roll. Covering 6 numbers leaves 4 numbers not covered. I don’t worry about the 2 and 12 that much because - they are supposed to be rare - so that leaves 2 numbers not covered when starting. THESE ARE THE NUMBERS THAT ALWAYS COME UP THE MOST!!! I don’t mind having a challenging game, but come on! I’ve gone 11 rolls without a single number I have coming up. Random should be a lot more random. This game’s AI is actively slanted against you in other ways as well (like robbing you when you have 3 points instead of robbing a player that has 8 points) but this one thing has made me hate this app. If you are playing other people that’s one thing, but otherwise it is a good way to win money by betting on when a 7 is going to be rolled, or what numbers will be the most rolled, or when a bot will win the game right before your turn when you have everything to win. I lost a game while playing 2 bots. The one bot was robbed 18 TIMES AND WON!!! The other bot and I we’re rodded 3 and 4 times respectively. That’s insane! Do not get the game if you want a fair fight against the AI. The makers need to fix this or I’ll never play it again. After posting this review I opened the app and it wouldn’t let me log in, said the server was full. Strange that this is the very first time that has every happened. Try a couple more times over the next few days and the same thing. Seems the markers of this game is trying to kill free speech just like Trump. Fnck You! Game deleted, and good riddance! NEVER GET THIS GAME! Why the makers choose to act this way is beyond reason. You could listen to your your customers and make a good game but you choose not to. Goodbye.

Full of bugs...but will be great when fixed. I have played many free multiplayer games on the fixed setup. About half of these have ended unsatisfactorily when one of the many bugs in the game hangs it up. I would love to become a paying customer and move on to new options but that will have to wait until enough of the bugs are fixed such that games can consistently finish without hanging up. At that point, I will happily become a paying customer. In the mean time I will play free games to monitor the hoped-for progress on the bug fixing. Update. Here is a tidbit that is essential to be able to use this app to play multiplayer, online games while the publisher is (hopefully) fixing the severe bugs that affect this usage: If the game hangs up or, to say it another way, gets stuck, then you can swipe the app closed and then restart it. Usually, you will be given an opportunity to rejoin the game and when you do, it will likely be unstuck and making progress. Good luck!

Used to love this game. I downloaded this game because I love Catan. There were some features of the game that I did not like (when playing online with other humans, the board never changes. You also have to wait 12 hours before you get a new sun so you can play with the AI players and you have no option to purchase more suns. Also, the dice is not randomized. If you are on a 6 or an 8 hexagon but do not have any on a 2,3,4, etc. expect to see those numbers rolled significantly more). However, I continued to play because as I previously mentioned, I love the board game. I even had all of my friends download it. Over the weekend, the app would not let me open it because it was “outdated”. I went ahead and updated it. It now is saying “find running game” and NEVER loads no matter if I am on WiFi or not. When I try to start a new game, it takes my sun away and makes me wait a whole 12 hours before I go through the same process all over again. I have not been able to play in days and I doubt I will get to play again unless the developers fix it.

Laughably bad dice generator. In case you haven’t played Catan before, this is a dice based game. Everything hinges on you getting lucky with the dice rolls to get the materials you need to build and expand. This is so critical to the game that each tile you can access has a number with an embedded probability indicator - 7 most probable, 6/8 second most, etc… So you’d think that of all the things to get right, given the importance to the game mechanics and player strategy, the game developer would implement a high quality random die generator. You’d be wrong. If you are going to play this game, build on the resources you care about. Ignore the numbers because they have no relation to the actual number distributions you will experience. It’s no longer a game of “can I control the strongest points on the map.” It’s “did I bet on 3s when the RNG decides to roll more of them than 8s”. Would get a refund if I could.

Worse than COVID?. Ok, maybe not, but this is the most maddening app I’ve ever used. Three friends and I have all paid up so we can play Cities & Knights /Seafarers (the best board game ever) during the pandemic. The game randomly gets stuck for 1 or 2 players at some point, with no way to proceed and finish games. We’ve finished maybe 20% of the games we’ve started, so frustrating. It works fine playing against AI players, but not real people friends. This was supposed to be the one bright/fun spot of the pandemic, but the developers have robbed us even of that. I won’t be trying again, but please fix the game so others can enjoy it. Also it takes a ridiculous amount of CPU/memory resources to play on the web interface, shocking for a board game. My brand new 16” MacBook Pro has to run the fans at full bore with only Chrome and this game running just to keep up. I think they need to re-code this entire game from the ground up, but I highly doubt they will fix any of this, which is sad.

VP Point Rules don’t work and VP’s glitch out. My complaint is that the scores don’t always work. For example the last two games I played: The points stated on the rule/legend card state that you get 2 points per every city piece, however it awards you only one point per city piece. Also sometimes the VP card doesn’t even count towards your victory points, probably a glitch. Longest road is supposed to be 2 VP, however sometimes you only get 1 and other times you get 3. Same with the largest army. I would give the game a higher rating if the glitches or inconsistency were addressed. For example in my last game I had, 4 cities, a settlement, longest road, and a VP card which would have been 12 points but instead I had 6 points and the player who had just 5 cities and no VP card, no longest road and no largest army and no settlements had 10 points. What is going on here? Please explain how this happened?

Lots of glitches, leveling, and dumb game dynamics. 1. There are numerous glitches including: a brief highlight of a resource card you will be dealt, constant freezes on the seafarers expansion map Oceania, and weird grey floaters that appear when two AI’s trade over your trade offer. 2. Just like the previous rendition of the Catan app, there is serious “leveling,” where a statistically impossible amount of 7’s are rolled and all the AI’s dump all their resource cards into development cards to knight steal you when you’re winning. It’s so ridiculous that even when you don’t have anymore cards, the AI will still choose to put the robber on your space. 3. There is a dumb rule where you can only play 1 game a day, at the expenditure of a “sun.” Of course there is a pay wall to buy more “suns.” 🙄 It’s like the game dynamics want me to move on and play something else, cuz that’s what I’m going to do.