Play Catan
Digital remake of brilliant board game is tough to learn
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Play Catan
Pros: Bright iconography and automated calculations help experienced players move quickly through the game.
Cons: Insufficient tutorials and a quick pace limit accessibility to new players.
Bottom Line: It's an okay browser-based translation of a great board game that can yield some engaged learning of probability and social studies with creative teacher support.
Teachers can use Play Catan to help kids build basic background knowledge about colonization, conflict, economics, and exploration, but both the iOS app and the original board game -- the gold standard -- are better starting places for kids. Play Catan is sometimes helpful as a teaching tool because of what it leaves out of the game. For example, because Play Catan doesn't include or reference native peoples or let players directly wage war on one another, teachers can ask students to compare and contrast how they play the game with how peoples and nations have behaved toward one another over time. There is a lot of room to think critically about Play Catan's depiction of settlement and colonization, and students can launch into knowledge and empathy building research projects that fill in some of the gaps left out by the game.
Play Catan is a fast-paced, online adaptation of the popular board game Settlers of Catan, where players act as colonists of a new land, vying for limited resources. After an initial round where players place two settlements and roads (trying to jockey for ideal position) on the board, they spend the rest of the game cooperating and competing with one another to build settlements and roads so they can gather the resources -- and victory points -- they need to gain influence and control. It's one of the best board games of all time, but this version is tough to integrate into classrooms. Kids can play online tutorials or host or join multiplayer games online, but a dated interface makes it hard to create or find games suitable to kids to play. Some games allow chat, while others don't. It's difficult to group students together, and each student needs an email address to register for the site. Quick, text-based tutorials introduce most of the game's key concepts, but they are not very deep, interactive, or welcoming for new players.
Play Catan is fun for kids who already know how to play, but even those kids will need help connecting the game to class content. A teacher acting as a guide-on-the-side can do a lot to help kids compare and contrast what happens in the game to what has happened throughout history as people have explored new lands, coveted resources, and entered into cooperation or conflict with one another. Since using mathematical probability to one's advantage is also key to victory, Play Catan serves as a great platform for kids to practice mathematical thinking.
Learning Rating
Community Rating
Not very user friendly. The App is much better but a great game for teaching math and social studies!
So first off, I LOVE the game Catan. So I tried to extend it to the classroom because really, the crux of the game is based on probability and natural resources (an extension of math and social studies). The website is awful. Your "free" account only comes with access to play others online in single games (no tournaments). The lack of tournaments is fine but I really wanted my students to be able to play at their own place in a non-competitive environment. I did upgrade to do this but did not renew my subscription. Also, the game itself is not Mac friendly so if you have Macs in your classroom, this will not work for you very well due to Java limitations. I had to use the program one student at a time on my personal laptop (non-Mac) and even so I had to sit with the student a long time at first to make sure he understood the game. The tutorials I think are helpful but maybe it was only because I knew the game well. The fact that students have to strategize about which spaces to select based on dice probabilities and to also look at different types of resources they may need to build roads, cities, and settlements was very intriguing for my student. It also made him think why 6 and 8 were high probability rolls, why 7 was the highest probability roll, why he shouldn't concentrate on a few resources, etc. A great game (supplemental only and only as an incentive though) for this type of math learning but the website is awful to use. We finally downloaded the app on an iPad and that works MUCH better. It did cost money but it was worth it!
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