Catan has been around since 1995, and the shelf has gotten crowded. Search Amazon for it today and you’ll find a two-player card game, a pirate game for six-year-olds, a version you draw on with markers, a space game with plastic motherships, a climate-change game, a Stone Age game, a $10 card game that plays in fifteen minutes, and something called the Family Edition that isn’t the one for families.
Every one of those boxes says CATAN in the same gold letters over the same rising sun. We’ve owned the base game for years and it’s been through more game nights than we can count (our full Catan review has the long version). Once we started looking at everything else wearing the name, it turned out to be hard to tell what you’re actually buying.
So we ranked them. What’s below covers the complete, standalone Catan games you can buy new right now, in order of how likely each one is to be the right box for most people. Expansions like Seafarers and Cities & Knights aren’t here, because they need the base game to work. We have a separate Catan expansions ranking for those. There’s also a section near the bottom on the out-of-print, collector and licensed versions, so you know what you’re looking at if one turns up secondhand.
Click here to jump to the comparison table…
New to the game entirely? Start with our simplified how-to-play guide. Already own it and getting crushed? Try our Catan strategy tips.
First, Three Things That Trip People Up
The 6th Edition is the current base game. It came out in 2025. Same rules as the 5th Edition, with new art, a bigger box with trays, and a rewritten rulebook. The expansions on shelves now are 6th Edition too. Older 5th Edition expansions will still play with it, since the rules didn’t change, but the art and card backs won’t match. If you care about that, buy everything from the same edition.
“Family Edition” does not mean “for kids.” It’s a cheaper, non-expandable version of regular Catan for ages 10 and up. The kids’ version is Catan Junior. That’s an easy mistake to make with a gift.
Anything with “5-6 Player” on the box is an add-on. Those boxes don’t contain a complete game. They need a base game (and the matching edition of it) to play.
Catan Versions Comparison Table
(Click the thumbnail to jump down to the entry)
| Image | Version | Players | Time | Price | Our Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Catan (6th Edition) | 3–4 (5–6 with extension) | 60–120 min | ~$40 | 3.8 / 5 |
 | Rivals for Catan | 2 | 45–60 min | ~$27 | — |
 | Catan Junior | 2–4 | 30 min | ~$38 | — |
 | Catan Zip! Edition | 3–4 | 60 min | ~$25 | — |
 | Catan: New Energies | 3–4 | 90 min | ~$70 | — |
 | Catan: On the Road | 3–4 | 15 min | ~$8–10 | — |
 | Catan: Starfarers | 3–4 | 120 min | ~$108 | — |
 | Catan: Dawn of Humankind | 3–4 | 90–120 min | ~$83 | — |
 | Catan Dice Game | 1–4 | 15–30 min | ~$13 | — |
 | Catan Family Edition | 3–4 | 60 min | ~$34 | — |
Prices are what Amazon was showing when we wrote this. They move around a lot, especially on the bigger boxes.
1. Catan (6th Edition) (Full Review Here)
Standalone. 3-4 players, 60-120 minutes, ages 10+.
The original is still the one to buy. Roll dice, collect wood, brick, sheep, wheat and ore from the hexes your settlements touch, trade for what you’re missing, and race to 10 points. Five minutes to teach. It’s the game most people in the hobby started on, and it’s held up for thirty years.
The trading is what makes it. Every turn becomes a little negotiation, and the table politics take over fast. Somebody gets three turns from winning and suddenly nobody will trade with them. Our group has done exactly that to Whitney.
It’s not perfect. Ryan gives it a 3.8 out of 5, and the reasons are the usual ones: if your numbers don’t roll, you can sit there for twenty minutes collecting nothing, and the opening few turns drag. But nothing else on this list does the core Catan experience better, and every expansion plugs into this box.
The 6th Edition updates the presentation and leaves the rules alone. If you already own a 5th Edition copy in good shape, there’s no reason to replace it.
If your group is usually five or six people, budget for the 5-6 Player Extension (about $24). You’ll want it at that player count, but it does nothing on its own. Make sure you get the 6th Edition extension to match a 6th Edition base game.
Check the 5-6 Player Extension Price on Amazon
2. Rivals for Catan
Standalone. 2 players, 45-60 minutes, ages 10+.
Regular Catan doesn’t work at two. The trading needs a crowd, and with one opponent the board feels empty. Rivals is the fix: a card game where each of you builds your own little principality in front of you, with roads, settlements and cities laid out as cards, and region cards you rotate to track how much of each resource you hold.
It still feels like Catan. You roll for production, you build toward victory points, and there’s a robber-style event die waiting to wreck your plans. What it adds is a tableau to manage. Every building and expansion card you place changes what your principality can do, so it plays more like a duel of engines than a race for the board.
We like it, but when it came up for our best two-player games list, we couldn’t put it on. A game with 13 pages of instructions just for the basic game is a hard sell to someone who wanted a quick evening with their partner. Start with the introductory game, which plays to 7 points, and don’t open the theme sets until you’ve got a few plays in.
If it’s mostly the two of you, this is the Catan to get. There’s also a Deluxe edition (about $36) with card trays and promo cards if you know you’ll play it a lot.
Check Rivals for Catan Price on Amazon
3. Catan Junior
Standalone. 2-4 players, 30 minutes, ages 6+.
The kids’ version, with a pirate theme. You build pirate lairs and ships instead of settlements and roads, the robber becomes a Ghost Captain, and development cards become Coco the parrot tiles that let you build something for free or grab resources right away.
It works because it takes out the parts of Catan that make kids cry. The Ghost Captain doesn’t steal from you, and there’s no rule that makes you discard half your hand. There’s a market where you can swap resources at a fixed rate, so a child who’s stuck always has a way to get unstuck. Games are done in half an hour.
The actual decision loop is still Catan’s, which is the point. A kid who plays this at six or seven already understands how production, trading and building work when they sit down at the grown-up table at nine or ten.
Parents who’ve played it a lot mention two things. Some of the plastic pieces are flimsy, and the Coco tiles can snowball for whoever figures out how good they are first. Neither is a dealbreaker.
Check Catan Junior Price on Amazon
4. Catan Zip! Edition
Standalone. 3-4 players, about 60 minutes, ages 10+.
The newest box on this list, out in spring 2026, and probably the cleverest. There’s no board. You get a pad of pre-printed island maps, one coloured pen per player, and you draw your roads, settlements and cities straight onto the paper. Resource cards are replaced by small cardboard tiles that sit in a tray in front of you. All of it zips into a cloth bag.
It’s the full game, rules and all, first to 10 points. The one real change is that roads are unlimited, since you’re drawing them. That makes it the best way to bring proper Catan on a trip without packing the big box.
The catch is the pad. It’s 25 double-sided sheets, so 50 maps, and then it’s used up. Fifty games is a lot of cottage weekends, but unlike the cardboard version, this box has a finish line. You still need a table for the tiles, too, so you can carry it anywhere but you can’t play it on your lap.
At around $25 it’s also the cheapest way to own a real game of Catan, which is worth knowing even if you never leave the house.
Check Catan Zip Price on Amazon
5. Catan: New Energies
Standalone. 3-4 players, about 90 minutes, ages 12+.
The best pick for a group that’s played regular Catan to death and wants something genuinely new without learning a whole new game. Designed by Klaus Teuber and his son Benjamin, it moves Catan into the modern era. You’re still building on a hex island, but now you’re also building power plants. Fossil fuel plants are cheap and fast. Renewable ones cost more and pay off slower.
The clever part is the bag. Each turn starts with drawing discs from a bag, and the bag starts out full of bad news: floods, pollution, production shutting down. Every fossil plant makes things worse, and every renewable plant adds good discs back in. Push the pollution too far and the game can end in catastrophe, and then the winner is whoever invested most in clean energy rather than whoever had the most points.
That creates the kind of tension Catan never had. Everyone wants someone else to pay for the clean energy while they take the cheap route, and the whole table can lose its bet on that together.
It’s a new box top to bottom, so nothing from your original copy carries over. And it’s a bigger, longer game than the original, so it’s not the one to teach a first-timer. The Ian O’Toole art is great, though.
Check Catan: New Energies Price on Amazon
6. Catan: On the Road
Standalone. 3-4 players, about 15 minutes, ages 10+.
A 120-card deck, no board, no dice, ten bucks. Released in April 2026 and designed by Benjamin Teuber, it squeezes the base game down into a fifteen-minute card game where you draw resources, build from a shared pool, trade, and race to 7 points.
The smart touch is in the trading. If you take part in someone else’s trade, you get a bonus resource card for it, which keeps people engaged on turns that aren’t theirs. One rule fixes a problem base Catan has always had.
Fifteen minutes doesn’t leave room for a long plan to play out, and you won’t get the board-building feel at all. It’s a filler and won’t replace the real game. But it’s the cheapest thing on this page by a wide margin, and it fits in a jacket pocket.
Check Catan: On the Road Price on Amazon
7. Catan: Starfarers
Standalone. 3-4 players, about 120 minutes, ages 14+.
Catan in space, and the most toy-like box on the list. Each player gets a big snap-together plastic mothership that you upgrade with boosters, cannons and cargo pods. To move, you shake the mothership, and the coloured balls that drop into its window tell you how far you can fly. It sounds gimmicky. People who own it tend to love it anyway.
Underneath, it’s still Catan: resource production from dice, colonies instead of settlements, trading. The new part is exploring. You fly out into an unknown map, run into alien civilizations, and resolve encounter cards that can go well or very badly. It’s a 2019 remake of a 1999 game, and the second edition is the one to get.
It’s 7th because of the commitment. Two hours, ages 14 and up, and a price that sits well over $100 when it’s not on sale. That’s a lot of money to find out your group doesn’t like being at the mercy of an encounter card. But if your group loves Catan and has always wished it had more adventure in it, this is the one.
There’s also a Starfarers Duel (2023) for two players, and a 5-6 player extension sold separately.
Check Catan: Starfarers Price on Amazon
8. Catan: Dawn of Humankind
Standalone. 3-4 players, 90-120 minutes, ages 12+.
A 2022 reboot of an older game called The Settlers of the Stone Age. You’re guiding a branch of early humans as they spread across the world map, with four resources instead of five: meat, hide, bone and flint. Campsites replace settlements, and they can only go on marked spots, so the map is less open than you’d expect.
The idea is great. Migration is a more interesting theme for a Catan game than another island, and developing your tribe’s technology adds a layer of planning the original doesn’t have. There’s a Neanderthal figure and a sabre-toothed cat on the board, which our group would absolutely fight over.
Reviews tend to land on the same verdict, though: it’s closer to a soft reboot of regular Catan than a new experience, and it costs twice as much. If you want one “new” Catan, New Energies changes more. Dawn of Humankind is for the fan who wants every flavour.
Check Catan: Dawn of Humankind Price on Amazon
9. Catan Dice Game
Standalone. 1-4 players, 15-30 minutes, ages 7+.
Six dice and a pad of score sheets with a little island printed on each one. You roll, keep what you want, re-roll Yahtzee-style, then spend the result to build roads, settlements and cities on your own sheet. Most points after the last round wins.
It plays solo, which nothing else on this list does well, and it’s small enough for a backpack. It’s also a cheap way to show a kid how the resource-and-build loop works.
The trade-off is interaction. There basically isn’t any. Everyone’s working on their own sheet, so it’s closer to a puzzle you happen to be doing at the same table. That’s fine for what it is. Just don’t expect it to feel like Catan.
Check Catan Dice Game Price on Amazon
10. Catan Family Edition
Standalone. 3-4 players, about 60 minutes, ages 10+.
Last, though the game itself is fine. It’s regular Catan with cheaper parts: plastic pieces, half-size cards, and a jigsaw-style board made of six interlocking pieces instead of individual hexes. The rules are the same. Setup is a little faster, though the board ends up less varied.
The problem is the price gap. Family Edition was around $34 when we checked. The real 6th Edition base game was about $40. For six dollars more you get better components, a properly random board, and a game that every Catan expansion works with. Family Edition isn’t compatible with any of them.
The name sends people the wrong way, too. If you’re shopping for a child, you want Junior. If you’re shopping for an adult, you want the real thing. The only time this makes sense is if you find it on deep discount and know you’ll never want an expansion.
Check Catan Family Edition Price on Amazon
What We Haven’t Ranked
The list above covers what you can easily buy new today. The Catan name has been on a lot more than that, and these are the ones most likely to turn up in a search or on a secondhand shelf.
Catan 3D Edition (2021) is the same rules as the base game with sculpted, hand-painted terrain tiles. It launched at $300, there’s a matching 3D Seafarers + Cities & Knights expansion, and it’s a collector’s piece. When we checked, Amazon had no current offer on it, so expect to hunt.
World’s Smallest Catan (2025) is a working three-player game that fits in a case smaller than a deck of cards. It’s a novelty and a stocking stuffer, not something you’ll play much.
Catan Traveler was the older portable version, a compact board with pegged pieces. Zip has effectively replaced it.
The Catan Histories games (Settlers of America: Trails to Rails, Rise of the Inkas, Struggle for Rome, Merchants of Europe) are standalone games with historical settings, even though the packaging can make them look like expansions. Most are out of print now.
Licensed versions like Star Trek Catan and A Game of Thrones Catan: Brotherhood of the Watch swap the theme on familiar rules. Both are worth a look if you’re a fan of the franchise and find one at a fair price.
Anniversary editions (15th and 25th) are the base game in fancier packaging. Check which edition the components match before buying expansions for one.
The Catan Card Game (1998 in English) is the ancestor of Rivals. Rivals is the better version.
So Which One Should You Actually Buy?
Never played it, buying one box: the 6th Edition base game. It’s the real thing, it’s around $40, and everything else in the series makes more sense after you’ve played it.
It’s mostly two of you: Rivals for Catan. Push through the rulebook and play the intro game first.
Buying for a kid aged 6-9: Catan Junior. Not the Family Edition.
You travel, or want the cheapest full game: Catan Zip.
You want a ten-dollar filler for the bag: On the Road.
Your group has played the base game a hundred times: New Energies first, then Starfarers if you want something big and silly. Or go the other direction and add an expansion to the box you already own.
You usually have five or six players: the base game plus the 5-6 Player Extension.
You play solo: the Dice Game.
The original is still the best Catan. Most of what came after is a version of it built for a particular situation: two players, young kids, a long drive, a group that wants a heavier evening. Rivals and Junior both solve real problems the base game can’t. But if you’re buying one box and want the best odds it actually hits the table, buy the one with the island on it.
Done with Catan altogether and want what’s next? We’ve got a list of board games similar to Catan. And if you think we’ve got the order wrong, tell us which one you’d move and why. The why is the interesting part.
Thumbnail image artificially generated for illustrative purposes.
