Games That Are Better Than Catan

Ten board games where nobody has to beg the table for one sheep.

Entries
10
Category
Games
Updated
  1. Wooden houses connected by pencil lines on a German map, piles of tiny coal, oil and uranium tokens in a market track.

    10. Power Grid

    2F-Spiele / Rio Grande Games (Friedemann Friese) · 2004

    Bid on power plants, buy coal and uranium from a market, and wire cities. Whoever leads goes first and pays more for fuel, so the game punishes success like a utility regulator. Originally German, called Funkenschlag. Friese likes his titles to start with F. Most of them do.

  2. A five-by-five grid of blank face-down cards on a table, a single black card set apart, a small sand timer next to it.

    09. Codenames

    Czech Games Edition (Vlaada Chvátil) · 2015

    Two spymasters give one-word clues to steer teams across a 5x5 grid of words, avoiding the assassin. Spiel des Jahres 2016, published in 38 languages. Plays eight people in 15 minutes, compared with four people and one long evening for Catan.

  3. Glossy blue, red and amber tiles arranged on a patterned 5x5 wall board, a few broken tiles in the penalty row.

    08. Azul

    Plan B Games (Michael Kiesling) · 2017

    Draft colored tiles inspired by Portuguese azulejos and lay them on a 5x5 wall. Spiel des Jahres 2018. The pieces feel like candy and the scoring is as mean as Catan's robber, just quieter about it.

  4. A tiny farm of wooden fences, sheep and boars on a board beside a bowl of grain and a nervous-looking stack of food tokens.

    07. Agricola

    Lookout Games (Uwe Rosenberg) · 2007

    Fourteen rounds to build a farmhouse, raise sheep and feed your family before each harvest, or take begging cards. It knocked Puerto Rico off the top of BoardGameGeek in 2008. A game about subsistence farming, and somehow it is stressful.

  5. Square terrain tiles forming a medieval landscape of walled cities and roads, small wooden figures standing on them.

    06. Carcassonne

    Hans im Glück (Klaus-Jürgen Wrede) · 2000

    Draw a tile, place it, drop a little wooden follower on a road, city or field. It won the Spiel des Jahres and the Deutscher Spiele Preis in 2001, and the word meeple was coined during a game of it. Farmers are the hard part. Farmers are always the hard part.

  6. Pastel speckled eggs nested on illustrated bird cards next to a small wooden birdhouse dice tower.

    05. Wingspan

    Stonemaier Games (Elizabeth Hargrave) · 2019

    A health consultant and amateur birder turned her 596-row bird spreadsheet into 170 field-guide-quality cards, pastel eggs and a birdhouse dice tower. Kennerspiel des Jahres 2019 and 2.6 million sold. The most competitive anyone has ever been about a cardinal.

  7. A hexagonal red planet board slowly turning green and blue, tiny ocean and forest tiles scattered across it, a thermometer on the side.

    04. Terraforming Mars

    FryxGames (Jacob Fryxelius) · 2016

    Corporations race to warm Mars, fill it with oxygen and oceans, and take credit. Designed by Jacob Fryxelius, illustrated by his brother Isaac, and credited to Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books for inspiration. Three hours of turning a red planet green on a card table.

  8. A world map with colored cubes clustered on cities, a vintage medical kit and a stack of red cards on the table edge.

    03. Pandemic

    Z-Man Games (Matt Leacock) · 2008

    Leacock made it cooperative because competitive games caused friction with his wife, and based it on SARS. Everyone wins or loses together against four diseases. Sales spiked during COVID-19, which says something about all of us.

  9. Rows of small plastic train cars in five colors laid along a map of North American railway routes, a paper train ticket on top.

    02. Ticket to Ride

    Days of Wonder (Alan R. Moon) · 2004

    Moon said the rules fit on a train ticket: draw cards, claim a route or take more destinations. Spiel des Jahres 2004 and over 20 million sold. Learnable in five minutes, which is exactly how long friendships last once someone blocks Denver.

  10. Tiny wooden canal boats, railway tracks and brick mill tiles on a sepia map of an industrial English town, a single beer barrel token beside them.

    01. Brass: Birmingham

    Roxley (Martin Wallace, Gavan Brown, Matt Tolman) · 2018

    Canals, then railways, across the Industrial Revolution Midlands: build mills, sell beer, network or die. It hit No. 1 on BoardGameGeek in 2023. It is a game about coal, and it is better than most games about dragons.

Honorable mentions

  • A hexagonal island board with a small black barbarian ship sailing toward it and wooden knights guarding the shore.

    Catan: Cities & Knights

    Kosmos (Klaus Teuber) · 1998

    The expansion that finally gives Catan something to fear: barbarians, knights to stop them, and city improvements. It is still Catan, which is cheating. It is also better than Catan, which is the list.

Dishonorable mentions

  • A stack of paper money and a little metal top hat abandoned on a game board, a yellowed 1904 patent drawing peeking out underneath.

    Monopoly

    Parker Brothers (Elizabeth Magie, uncredited) · 1935

    Lizzie Magie patented The Landlord's Game in 1904 to show how rents enrich owners and ruin tenants. Charles Darrow got the credit, and Parker Brothers bought her patent for $500. A game about getting fleeced, sold by getting her fleeced.

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