In the dice game version of CATAN, you also build settlements, roads, cities, and knights.
Here, however, building doesn't mean placing wooden or plastic game pieces on a game board. Instead, each player has a sheet depicting a smaller version of the island of Catan. You build by filling in the respective symbols for roads, knights, settlements, and cities.
Building a road, settlement, or city costs the same resources as in the big brother version of the game, but the way you obtain the required resources is completely different.
On your turn, you may roll 6 special dice up to three times. After each dice roll, you may either set aside part of the dice or roll all dice again.
Each side of a die depicts one of CATAN's resources: brick, lumber, wool, grain, ore, or gold.
For example, if you roll 2 lumber, 2 brick, 1 grain, and 1 wool, you may build - i.e., fill in - a road and a settlement.
Each side of a die depicts one of Catan's resources: brick, lumber, wool, grain, ore, or gold.
For example, if you roll 2 lumber, 2 brick, 1 grain, and 1 wool, you may build - i.e., fill in - a road and a settlement.
Of course, you also must observe certain rules when building. At the beginning of the game, the first road is already depicted as a built road. Starting from this road, you continue building more roads. Each road built is worth 1 point. The order in which settlements and cities must be built corresponds to the number of points they are worth, from low to high. The points for building a settlement increase from 3 to 11, and the points for building a city even rise from 7 to 30. Since you can build a city or settlement only adjacent to an already built road, you might often find yourself in a situation where you wonder whether you should build a city, which is more lucrative but more difficult to build, or a settlement, which is less lucrative but easier to build.
And what is the task of Catan's knights? Well, each of the 6 terrain hexes depicts the contours of a knight.
If you build (fill in) a knight, once during the game you may use the resource of a terrain hex where a knight was built in place of another resource of your choice.
That is, after the third dice roll you may turn one of the dice so that the resource corresponding to this knight's hex is face up.
After building, you enter your points in one of the 15 boxes depicted on your sheet. The game ends after each player has finished 15 turns. The player with the highest score wins.
