Catan Map Generator

I've played a fair amount of Settlers of Catan in my day, and I find that a lot of the skill in the game comes from the initial placements. Almost two years ago, I built a rough setup that randomized tiles and numbers. My plan was to screenshot the boards, and make posts on Reddit to discuss the best positions to start a discussion and improve my skills. Then, I made a post on Reddit.

This was what the board generator looked like, and it was OKAY. It had a few problems that people pointed out: it didn't randomize the port locations, and it wasn't well designed for a discussion format because it was so hard to say what positions they were choosing. Also, I presented it in a 3-person match which rubbed people the wrong way.

So, yesterday I blocked out some time to polish and finish it up. I re-scanned my copy of the board, and did some Photoshop magic to extract the resources I needed. The site is live here, and you can also check out the site on Github, with the 'large_assets' folder having the raw scans that I took and some of the extracted pieces that I used for building the game. It's pretty hard to find accurate and good quality resources for the board/pieces online.

You can randomize the board, link people to the board you're on, or link people to a board with specific moves on it (it's a snake draft with 4 players, red -> blue -> yellow -> white, and back again). For example, here's a specific board:

and here's the link to it, along with a link to the board with my first move as Red. As you can see, I added in the randomized ships and updated the tokens to the newer version for consistency. Feel free to make your own, or use it as a challenge!