Catan Classic 4+

I have had this App for years. And have played a lot. I love Catan and the app is pretty good, but as seen in other reviews there is both silly and frustrating AI behavior. They definitely team up on you when you’re about to win, but not each other. The probability of 7’s being rolled when you’re about to win is comically probable. The AI definitely play knight cards when they don’t even have development cards. The trading with AI is tilted toward the human player—basically because you can always keep asking them over and over what they would give to maximize your gain, which no human would put up with. The AI will sometimes build roads in directions that have no value whatsoever. And while I believe that the dice roll may match the bell curve, there is definitely a high probability of your numbers being rolled while it’s blocked by the robber. And also a higher likelihood than normal that all your numbers will get rolled in sequence followed by a seven. I think the AI’s weren’t smart enough initially to challenge human players, so they added all of these strange handicaps.

Game is not worth $5 by any stretch of anyones imagination. Terrible layout. 40% of the game screen is water/unused surface, but for some reason they lay the ridiculous emojis over ur opponents running score. The game selection menu is junk. Worse than junk. Hot, sweaty, junky junk. If someone does not accept to join game, all players are reshuffled per each not acceptance and have to accept each time a new player even enters the screen. Makes no sense. Worst part is people not playing. There is apparently no time limit on turns, which is obnoxious, and when someone quits mid game, instead of just switching over to AI player seamlessly, all players are logged out to menu screen and have to re-accept playing a game that they are already playing. The game freezes constantly. Like 60% of the time. It’s like the have one server. You are likely to complete about 20% of games started because either the game freezes, someone else quits mid game and it just idles endlessly, or you quit yourself out of frustration. Whoever designed this game should have an immediate reduction in pay, or at minimum should have to spend the months of June-August scrubbing the Oakland Coliseum mens room latrines….. if u have never been there, it is a community urinal…… sooooo….. u know…… gross…… just like this game layout and functions. Yuck. THIS GAME IS FRIGGIN GARBAGE!!! I want my money back.

First thing this game pays no attention to odds of a number being rolled. Normally, mid-range numbers are the best, for example 6 and 8. This developer has some lunatic system where 12 & 2 will be rolled frequently if the AI needs those resources, and if you are on 6 & 8 those numbers become infrequent. 7s will be rolled several times in a row to beat you down if you are ahead. I have played many games where I’m ahead and the next 3 rolls are 7, and on top of that, 3 robber cards get played on you. You literally get beaten to a pulp and are helpless. Now one might argue that it is a good idea to buy development cards, except the game cheats here to. I’ve played games where by turn 3 or 4, each of the AI players have multiple dev cards, when a resource used to buy them has only been rolled maybe once up to that point, for example sheep. I just finished a game where one of the AI players had pretty bad board position with no stone and a “3” grain. They had 3 cities and what seemed to be a constant supply of dev cards. They also had no ports, so it’s very fishy and didn’t seem possible. Basically the developer ignores dice odds and just cheats when they need to bash you out of the lead. Otherwise it not a bad game.