10 Games Like Catan: What to Play Next After Settlers

Terraforming Mars ($50) is the best game to play after Catan because it takes the resource management and engine building that hooked you in Catan and adds 200+ project cards that make every session feel different -- the strategic depth scales up without losing the satisfying arc of building something from nothing. If Catan's trading and negotiation is what you love most, Bohnanza ($15) doubles down on that element specifically.

That itch for something new is actually a good sign. It means Catan's fundamental appeal has taken root—the satisfaction of resource management, the thrill of negotiation, the pleasure of building something on a board—and now it's time to explore games that take those elements further. Each of the 10 games I recommend on this list captures something that makes Catan great while adding new dimensions. Some lean harder into trading. Others deepen the strategy. A few introduce entirely new mechanics that'll become favorites in their own right. All remain accessible to anyone who knows how to play Catan.

Related picks: Best Board Games of 2026, Best Strategy Board Games for Beginners, and How to Start a Board Game Collection: Complete Beginner's Guide.

What Makes Catan Click

Before jumping into recommendations, it helps to identify exactly what produces Catan work, because varied players love it for alternative reasons. Your ideal "next game" depends on which elements resonated most.

Trading and negotiation—the social engine that keeps everyone engaged and turns every game into a conversation. Resource management—the satisfaction of collecting materials and converting them into something useful. Spatial strategy—the puzzle of where to build on a shared map. Accessible complexity—strategic sufficient to reward planning, simple enough to teach in 10 minutes. Randomized setup—hex boards reshuffle every game, keeping sessions fresh.

Below, each game highlights which Catan elements it amplifies, making it easy to match preferences to recommendations.

10 Games to Play After Catan

Bohnanza

Amplifies: Trading and negotiation | Players: 2-7 | Play time: 45 minutes | Style: Card game

Bohnanza demands the part of Catan that most people love best—the trading—and builds an entire game around it. Players become bean farmers who must plant beans in their fields in a specific order. Here's the catch: cards must stay in hand order (no rearranging), and planting unwanted beans indicates tearing out profitable fields. Your solution? Trade away unwanted beans to other players, leading to the most intense, freewheeling negotiation in all of tabletop gaming.

Every turn features a mandatory trading phase where the active player flips two cards from the deck and offers them (along with anything in hand) to the table. Deals can involve anything: "take my stink bean and give me two red beans," "plant this coffee bean for me and I owe you a wax bean later." Completely open and unstructured, the negotiation signals social dynamics, bluffing, and favor-trading become core strategic tools.

Playing Bohnanza feels like a farmers' market where everyone's simultaneously buying and selling. Games run about 45 minutes, rules take five minutes to teach, and the player count stretches to seven—making it ideal for larger groups. For anyone whose favorite section of Catan involves yelling "does anyone have brick?" across the table, Bohnanza is the next step.

Concordia

Amplifies: Resource management and spatial strategy | Players: 2-5 | Play time: 90-120 minutes | Style: Hand management and area control

Concordia is where Catan players graduate when they want deeper strategy without more rules. Players become Roman merchants expanding trade networks across the Mediterranean. Each switch, you enjoy one card from your hand to take an action: produce resources in cities where you've built trading posts, move merchants along routes, construct new trading posts, or buy new action cards. When any player plays the Tribune card, all played cards return to hand, resetting the cycle.

Concordia's masterpiece is its scoring system. Victory points aren't tracked during tackle. Instead, each card in your hand scores based on a exact criterion at game end—one card scores for cities producing brick, another for trading posts in a particular region, another for resource diversity. This suggests every card purchase is simultaneously an action and a scoring opportunity, creating a beautiful double-layered decision on every acquisition.

Playing Concordia feels calm and cerebral despite competitive underpinnings. There's no dice rolling, no random events, and no "take that" moments. Interaction is entirely spatial—competing for the same trade routes and cities—which feels strategic rather than aggressive. Games operate 90 to 120 minutes, a stage up from Catan, but the decision density implies time flies. For Catan players ready for a game where every single decision matters, Concordia ranks among the best strategy games ever designed.

Ticket to Ride

Amplifies: Accessible complexity and spatial strategy | Players: 2-5 | Play time: 30-60 minutes | Style: Route building

Ticket to Ride includes the lateral shift from Catan—similar weight, similar accessibility, but a distinct experience. Instead of settling an island, players forge train routes across the United States (or other maps in the many expansions). Collect colored train cards, claim routes by playing matching sets, and connect cities on secret destination tickets for bonus points.

What Ticket to Ride shares with Catan is effortless onboarding. Rules take five minutes. Strategic depth emerges organically through engage with. Tension builds naturally as the board fills up and routes begin getting blocked. What it adds is a cleaner, less luck-dependent encounter—no dice rolls determine resource production, and competition is purely spatial.

Playing Ticket to Ride feels breezy and accessible for most of the game, then suddenly tense when key routes launch disappearing. Games execute 30 to 60 minutes, the oversized board is colorful and inviting, and gameplay handles five players gracefully. For groups that love Catan's accessibility but want something with less downtime and no kingmaker trading dynamics, Ticket to Ride delivers the answer.

Chinatown

Amplifies: Pure negotiation | Players: 3-5 | Play time: 60 minutes | Style: Tile placement and trading

Chinatown is the ultimate negotiation game. Players become business owners in 1960s New York's Chinatown, placing shops on a shared board and trading properties, tiles, and money in completely unrestricted negotiations. There aren't any rules about what can or can't be traded. Cash, properties, future promises, partial ownership agreements—everything's on the table. Only rule? Deals must be honored once made.

What brings Chinatown special is its transparent scoring. Everyone can see which businesses are close to completion, which properties are valuable, and roughly how plenty of points each deal is worth. Perfect information transforms negotiation from vague haggling into precise economic calculation. "Your tea shop needs one more tile to complete, and I have it. That tile's worth 40 points to you and 0 points to me. I want $30,000 for it." Ruthless, mathematical, and deeply satisfying.

Playing Chinatown feels like a high-stakes real estate negotiation compressed into 60 minutes. Deals get increasingly complex as the game progresses, and whoever generates the best deals—not the one with the best board position—wins. For Catan players who wish the trading phase lasted the entire game, Chinatown is a revelation.

Carcassonne

Amplifies: Spatial strategy with simplicity | Players: 2-5 | Play time: 35-45 minutes | Style: Tile placement

Carcassonne shares Catan's hex-based spatial puzzle but replaces resource management with pure tile placement. Players draw one tile per rotate from a stack and place it adjacent to existing tiles, extending a growing scene of cities, roads, monasteries, and fields. After placing a tile, you can claim a trait by placing a meeple on it, scoring points when the feature gets completed.

Carcassonne's brilliance lies in simplicity layered over genuine strategic depth. Rules are learnable in three minutes—draw a tile, zone it, optionally location a meeple. But decisions about where to spot tiles and when to commit limited meeples create a spatial puzzle that rewards both tactical thinking and long-term planning. Sharing or stealing contains from other players by connecting your tiles to theirs brings indirect competition without direct conflict.

Playing Carcassonne feels organic and creative. Landscapes grow differently every game, and the evolving board creates opportunities and challenges that no one can predict. Games steer 35 to 45 minutes, tile art is attractive and functional, and gameplay scales well from two to five. For Catan players who love the hex-based map-building but want something faster and more streamlined, Carcassonne supplies a natural fit.

Terraforming Mars

Amplifies: Resource management and engine building | Players: 1-5 | Play time: 120-180 minutes | Style: Engine building and zone command

Terraforming Mars is the destination for Catan players who want to go deep. Players become corporations working to prepare Mars habitable by raising temperature, increasing oxygen, and creating oceans. Over many generations (rounds), players play project cards from a massive deck, building interconnected systems that produce resources, terraform the planet, and score victory points.

Resource management in Terraforming Mars yields Catan's five resources feel like a warm-up. Six resource types, each with both a current stockpile and a production rate, create a layered economic apparatus where investing in production early pays dividends for the rest of the game. Over 200 unique project cards ensure that every game presents separate strategic opportunities, and card combos can be spectacularly powerful.

Playing Terraforming Mars feels like building a civilization in two hours. Early game is slow and resource-starved. Midgame accelerates as engines come online. Late game becomes a race to convert accumulated resources into final victory points before the planet's fully terraformed and the game ends. Games drive two to three hours, which is a significant time commitment, but the strategic richness justifies every minute. For Catan players ready to graduate to something substantially deeper, Terraforming Mars is the destination.

Kingdom Builder

Amplifies: Randomized setup and spatial strategy | Players: 2-4 | Play time: 45 minutes | Style: Spot precision

Kingdom Builder, crafted by Catan creator Donald X. Vaccarino, shares Catan's DNA in obvious ways. Modular boards assemble from randomized quadrants, and three randomly selected scoring conditions determine how points are earned each game. Each flip, players nook three settlements on the board according to placement rules determined by their lone terrain card. Your goal? Posture settlements to maximize the three scoring conditions, which can reward extended chains, settlements near targeted sports, or spreading across multiple board sections.

Randomized scoring conditions are what craft Kingdom Builder compelling. One game might reward building the longest connected chain of settlements. Next might reward having settlements in every board quadrant. A third might reward clustering near castles. Same placement decision that scores nicely under one set of conditions might be worthless under another, forcing players to adapt their strategy to the defined game rather than following a memorized formula.

Playing Kingdom Builder feels spatial and puzzly. Limited card draws (one per pivot) constrain options in a method that forces creative placement, and special ability tokens scattered across the board provide powerful rule-breaking actions that add variety. Games run about 45 minutes, keeping the session tight and replayable. For Catan players who love the modular board and want a game where scoring changes every time, Kingdom Builder is a direct spiritual successor.

7 Wonders

Amplifies: Simultaneous play and strategic variety | Players: 2-7 | Play time: 30 minutes | Style: Card drafting

7 Wonders eliminates one of Catan's few weaknesses—downtime between turns—by having everyone play simultaneously. Each round, players select a card from a hand of seven, reveal them at the same time, then pass remaining cards to the next player. Over three ages, players establish civilizations by drafting cards that represent resources, military, science, commerce, and civic buildings. Each card interacts with your existing tableau and your immediate neighbors' civilizations.

Drafting generates a Catan-like resource management puzzle compressed into 30 minutes. Knowing that the hand you pass will arrive back around minus one card produces constant resistance between taking what you need and denying what your neighbors want. Three-age structure escalates the power and cost of available cards, mirroring the early-to-late-game progression that Catan handles through settlement upgrades.

Playing 7 Wonders feels fast and engaging because there's genuinely zero downtime. Everyone renders decisions simultaneously, then reveals. Interaction with neighbors (only the players to your immediate left and right) holds the social element present without creating the free-for-all trading dynamics that sometimes stall Catan games. Games run about 30 minutes regardless of player count, which is remarkable for a game that handles up to seven players. For larger groups who find Catan's four-player cap limiting, 7 Wonders provides the solution.

Viticulture

Amplifies: Resource management with worker placement | Players: 1-6 | Play time: 45-90 minutes | Style: Worker placement

Viticulture transplants Catan's resource management into a vineyard setting and replaces dice-driven resource production with worker placement. Players manage vineyards through the seasons—planting vines in spring and summer, harvesting grapes in fall, and making wine in winter. Workers are placed on shared action spaces to perform these tasks, and limited spaces create blocking competition that feels like a more controlled version of Catan's robber mechanic.

Seasonal structure gives Viticulture a natural rhythm that Catan's free-form rounds lack. Each year flows from planting to harvesting to selling, and the satisfaction of watching a vine go from planted to harvested to aged wine to fulfilled order over several rounds is deeply rewarding. Wake-up track, where players choose their twist order each year by trading priority for bonus resources, introduces a layer of strategic planning that retains the early game interesting.

Playing Viticulture feels thematic and satisfying. In my vibe, the vineyard theme is one of the most appealing in board gaming, and the mechanics support it beautifully. Games run 45 to 90 minutes, the essential edition is the recommended starting point, and gameplay works effectively at every count from one to six. For Catan players who love resource conversion but want a more structured, less luck-dependent framework, Viticulture is an outstanding next measure.

Settlers of the Deep

Amplifies: Everything about Catan, underwater | Players: 3-4 | Play time: 60-90 minutes | Style: Trading and building

For Catan players who want more Catan but diverse, Starfarers of Catan and the recently released Catan: Starfarers both extend the Catan formula into space. But for something closer to home that still feels fresh, upcoming fan-favorite reimplementations and spin-offs in the Catan universe offer familiar mechanics in new settings. Core Catan mechanism—hex-based boards, resource production through dice, trading between players, building toward victory points—has been adapted to dozens of variants.

Catan expansions themselves deliver significant new gameplay. Seafarers lends ocean exploration and island hopping. Cities and Knights injects a complex combat and trade arrangement. Traders and Barbarians contributes a collection of modular scenarios. Each expansion changes the strategic field without abandoning the fundamentals that made the base game compelling.

For players who aren't ready to leave the Catan ecosystem but want variety, the expansion path supplies dozens of hours of new content built on familiar foundations. For players ready to explore beyond Catan entirely, every other game on this lineup offers a new perspective on the elements that made Catan excellent.

Quick Reference Table

Who This Isn't For

Skip this guide if:

• You actually don't like Catan—these share DNA with it
• You want something completely different—try a different genre instead
• Your group loved Catan's negotiation specifically—not all Catan-likes have strong trading

How to Choose Your Next Step

Finding the right game depends on what you love most about Catan.

If trading is your favorite part, Bohnanza and Chinatown both double down on negotiation as the primary mechanic. Bohnanza is lighter and performs with more players. Chinatown is more strategic and mathematical.

If the spatial puzzle appeals to you, Carcassonne and Kingdom Builder both include satisfying map-building decisions without the resource management overhead. Ticket to Ride adds route-building firmness in a similarly accessible package.

If you want deeper strategy, Concordia and Terraforming Mars both reward lengthy-term planning and supply the kind of strategic depth that preserves players engaged for years. Concordia is the gentler introduction. Terraforming Mars is the rich dive.

If you play with large groups, 7 Wonders handles up to seven players in 30 minutes, and Bohnanza scales to seven as capably. Both solve Catan's four-player cap without inflating play time.

If you aren't ready to leave Catan, expansions offer genuine new gameplay within the familiar framework. Seafarers is the best starting expansion, adding exploration without overwhelming complexity.

Every game on this roundup shares something with Catan—the accessibility, the social energy, the satisfaction of building and trading—while offering something Catan doesn't. My recommendation? Pick the one that amplifies the segment of Catan that resonates most. Bring it to the next game night, and watch the hobby expand.