Catan Universe

Trade, Build, Settle

Ratings

Age

9+

Games

Languages

English

Latest Version 2.7.5

Mon Jul 20 2026

Patch 2.7.5: getting ready for the new season!

Season Matchmaking: You'll now be matched reliably only with other season players, and every season match counts toward your Elo.

Player Count & Maps: Numerous fixes for wrong player counts and incorrectly loaded maps in 3-4 and 5-6 player matches.

Settings: The player count slider now reliably remembers your selection, and matchmaking is no longer blocked by missing board customisation choices.

Play your favorite game Catan anytime, anywhere: the original board game, the card game, the expansions and ‘Catan – Rise of the Inkas‘, all in one app! After a long voyage of great deprivation, your ships have finally reached the coast of an unknown island. However, other explorers have also landed on Catan: The race to settle the island has begun! Build roads and cities, trade skillfully and become Lord or Lady of Catan. Go on a journey to the Catan universe, and compete in exciting duels against players from all over the world. The classic board game and the Catan card game bring a real tabletop feeling to your screen!

Dinsun Expert Review

Our Expert Score

90/100

Catan Universe is the definitive way to experience the legendary board game on mobile. It successfully translates the complex social dynamics of 'The Settlers of Catan' into a digital format that feels both modern and nostalgic. The 3D graphics bring the island of Sodor to life, and the cross-platform play ensures that you're never waiting long for a match.

What I appreciate most is the inclusion of the various expansions like 'Cities & Knights' and 'Seafarers.' The AI is challenging for solo players, but the real heart of the game is the multiplayer community. While the economy of 'Catan Gold' can be a bit of a hurdle for new players, the base game experience is polished to a mirror finish. Whether you're a veteran player or a newcomer, this is the most comprehensive digital version of Catan available.

Dinsun reviewed on: Wed Feb 25 2026

Features

Cross-platform play with players worldwide

Faithful 3D graphics of the original board game

Includes Seafarers, Cities & Knights, and Rise of the Inkas

In-depth tutorial for beginners

Customizable avatars and game boards

Guild system and competitive leaderboards

Tips & Walkthrough

Settling the Island

Start by placing your first two settlements and roads. Roll the dice to collect resources based on the hexes your settlements touch. Use wood, brick, grain, wool, and ore to build more roads, settlements, or upgrade to cities. Trade with other players or the bank to get the resources you need to reach 10 victory points.

Gameplays

Multiplayer and Expansions

Join the global community to play against other settlers. You can participate in the basic game or dive into deep strategy with expansions like 'Cities & Knights' which adds new commodities and barbarians, or 'Seafarers' which introduces shipping routes and islands.

Screenshot

Q&A

The basic game is free to play against two other human players; further expansions and features require Catan Gold.

Ratings & Reviews

Trades stop working until game is restarted after iPad screen locks

Wed Aug 02 2023 Iser3456

I love this game, really I do. I play it multiple hours per week just against the computer AI (mostly in dice mode since “rolled” number distributions seem much more fair), but about a year ago, the most annoying thing started happening: whenever I would start a game, if I got distracted by a phone call or whatever and my iPad would turn off / have its screen locked, whenever I would reopen the iPad and start playing again, the computer AI would open trade windows but then immediately close them again, not allowing me to respond. Attempts to respond / accept the trades would go ignored until I exited the game and reopened ‘ continued the same game. I also see this behavior when on a plane whenever WiFi cuts in and out. I get that the game needs to reconnect to the server at times, but why not allow those connections to happen at the end of the game rather than in the middle? When I open the game after the iPad has been off for a bit, why can’t it reconnect on its own (like it used to) or wait until the end of the game to upload game info to the server? The same when WiFi cuts in and out, why not try to reconnect after 5 seconds of it being down or something like that? This is so frustrating! Not enough to make me stop playing, but it definitely tarnishes my playing experience. Are there any game config settings I can update or iPad permissions to have this work properly? Or are there any other simple workarounds? If not, can you please fix this? Like I said, it used to work.

Just needs one thing

Tue Oct 20 2026 Reviewer 1983

I’ve had this app for close to 7 years now. Originally I just used the free parts. It was fun and fairly simple to use. My friends and I enjoyed quite a few games together. I never had technical issues although on occasion one of my friends did. Now, my husband and I purchased some of the game boards as well as some of our friends. We’ve continued to have fun, love the variety of game boards, and the individualization capabilities. We’ve only had technical difficulties twice with our friends (some of the rules of the game board were glitching) and quite a few times with just my husband and I (although usually has to do with WiFi connection and can be resolved by restarting and/or changing to a different device). Some of rules are different than the physical game but we like the changes and there aren’t many of them. The AI robot difficulty, when you’re playing solo (on master mode) is pretty decent. When you’re playing with others and have to add a master robot, they’re difficulty level significantly decreases even on master mode (this could be improved). There are many games where certain numbers are favored by the dice (but what people don’t often know is that computerized randomization of numbers cannot actually be attained). It doesn’t make it impossible to win if the dice are against you, we’ve managed many, many times to still win. You just need to be clever. Our only desire is this: we would love a feature added where we could design our own boards. We’ve played through the provided boards hundreds of times and still want to play but are a bit tired of the boards we have (and we’ve bought most of them).

Purchased Gold not showing up

Wed Jul 10 2024 Melikely

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! 🤞🤞

Great game, horrible developers.

Sun Nov 26 2023 JRA1987

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.

Obviously rigged

Fri Feb 11 2022 mcresh1

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.

Extremely Buggy

Wed Aug 22 2018 ExperiencedProjectEngineer

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!

Bug/glitch filled app, otherwise great game

Sat Jan 03 2026 Santo Maria

Unfortunately this app is filled with bugs if you try the online multiplayer mode. The FIRST bug is that if a player leaves the game the ai takes over but it will eventually just keep asking for trades that you deny and regardless will keep trying to ask them. Eventually everyone leaves the game out of desperation. There is a SECOND bug that if you run out of time while the trade window is open then the game keeps you in the trade window, you can close it out with the eye to the right but those buttons stay on the window and completely cover the buttons to reject or accept trades during everyone else’s turns, but once it gets back to your turn… well now you can’t roll the dice because that button is now covered as well so then you get kicked out because you took too long. The THIRD bug, isn’t a bug, I just think their servers must have some type of issue because I have constantly been kicked out of games, it will say trying to reconnect but will never connect back in. I know it’s not my WiFi because all my other devices including this one are able to load other webpages while on the app. What’s truly just frustrating is how deep you can get into these games committing hours of time only to then have all that effort go to waste. Especially given that the multiplayer is a premium offering that we pay for it should work as intended, I truly hope they fix it as it is otherwise a great game.

Someone needs a statistics lesson

Sat Mar 04 2023 behduajqnshi

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.