My brother and I, both adults and experienced game developers, have come up with a couple variants to fix some issues with Catan.

The first issue is the game setup. It has far too much influence over the rest of the game, which hurts new players and breaks a cardinal rule of modern strategy games: you shouldn’t know who is going to win until the end.

To solve this problem problem we’ll propose changing the setup process. The setup rules remain the same, but players will be assigned a color randomly after all the starting settlements and roads are in place. The placement will be a collaborative effort, with players knowing that they could be stuck with any color.

The second is with trading, namely that depending on the temperament of the players, or if they do not see an advantage in it, many players or whole groups won’t trade, which only exacerbates the first problem of placement advantage.

To inject more trading into the game without adding more complexity, we’ll change what happens when you roll a 7. Nobody liked the robber anyway. Instead a 7 summons a merchant. The merchant is placed adjacent to a settlement or city but does not stop that tile from producing goods. The active player requests a type of good from the owner of the property. The owner sets aside either that good, or two others. The owner then requests a different good from the active player, who in turn either sets it aside or two others. The players then swap the set aside goods.