Catan is the game that cracked open the hobby for more people than any other title. The hexagonal tiles, the dice, the trading, the “I’ll give you two ore for a wheat” - it’s embedded in a generation of board gamers. BGG rank #620, weight 2.28 out of 5, rated 7.09 across nearly 130,000 votes. Not the most acclaimed game on BGG, but possibly the most important one.
But Catan has a ceiling. The luck can feel punishing. The trading degrades into kingmaking. The robber loses its sting after a hundred games. And at some point, you find yourself wanting something with more teeth - or just something different that still scratches that same itch.
These seven games are for that moment. Each one captures something specific about why Catan works, then builds on it. Ordered from most accessible to most demanding so you can find your natural next step.
What Makes Catan Work?
Before recommending alternatives, it helps to be precise about why Catan clicks:
- Dice-driven resources - every turn produces something for someone; the game feels alive
- Player trading - negotiation is the heart of every session; the table is social, loud, argumentative
- Territory building - placing roads, settlements, and cities on a map gives a satisfying sense of expansion
- Simple enough to teach anyone - the barrier to entry is low; Catan parties happen across demographics
The best Catan alternatives each capture at least two or three of these qualities. The seven below offer their own answer to the same design problem.
1. King of Tokyo (Weight 1.48)
BGG rank #497 · Rating 7.11 · 2-6 players · 30 min
King of Tokyo - press-your-luck monster combat at its most chaotic. Image © IELLO
If what you love about Catan is the dice, the direct competition, and the feeling that anyone can win, King of Tokyo delivers all of that in half the time.
You play as giant monsters - Godzilla archetypes, robotic behemoths, aliens - fighting for control of Tokyo. Each turn you roll five custom dice up to three times (Yahtzee-style), and the results let you deal damage to opponents, collect energy cubes to buy power cards, or score victory points. The twist: whoever’s in Tokyo takes damage from everyone else, but they’re the only one dealing damage to all other players at once. Do you push in for the aggression, or hover at the edge and pick your moment?
It plays in 30 minutes, runs up to six players, and is one of the best “gateway plus” games in the hobby. If your Catan group is ready to try something with a bit more chaos and direct conflict but not a lot more rules, this is the easiest bridge.
Play this if: you love the dice, the conflict, and the laughs, and you want Catan’s energy without Catan’s trade negotiation.
2. Bohnanza (Weight 1.67)
BGG rank #546 · Rating 7.08 · 2-7 players · 45 min
Bohnanza - the trading card game that out-Catans Catan at its own best mechanic. Image © Amigo
The dirty secret of Catan is that its best moments are the trades. Not the dice rolls, not the settlements - the negotiation. Someone desperately needs one wheat. You have three. What’s it worth?
Bohnanza strips everything else away and leaves pure trading. You’re planting beans (seventeen varieties of beans, with magnificent names like Chilli Bean, Coffee Bean, and Wax Bean) across field cards in front of you, selling them for coins when a field gets crowded. The catch: you cannot rearrange your hand. Cards must be played in the order you hold them. So you’re constantly negotiating with other players - “take this Cocoa Bean, I’ll throw in a Red Bean, what do you need?” - to get the cards you need to plant and the cards out of your hand you desperately don’t.
Bohnanza is loud, fast, funny, and surprisingly tense. It scales brilliantly from four to seven players, which Catan cannot say. If you’ve ever found yourself more interested in the trading phase of Catan than the building phase, this is the game you’ve been looking for.
Play this if: trading is your favourite part of Catan and you want more of exactly that.
3. Carcassonne (Weight 1.88)
BGG rank #239 · Rating 7.42 · 2-5 players · 45 min
Carcassonne - medieval tile placement with teeth. Image © Z-Man Games
Like Catan, Carcassonne is built around building a world together on the table. Unlike Catan, it replaces dice luck with tile-draw luck - each turn you flip a landscape tile and must place it legally, then optionally deploy a “meeple” follower to claim a road, city, monastery, or field.
The scoring is the thing. Completed cities and roads score immediately. Farmers scoring at game end can swing the whole result, which means the apparently-peaceful act of laying tiles is quietly aggressive. Slipping a meeple into someone else’s nearly-finished city is one of the most quietly devastating plays in any gateway game.
Carcassonne is one of the great gateway games for a reason: it teaches in five minutes, plays in 45, works brilliantly at two players (unlike Catan), and rewards experience without punishing beginners. The tile-placement satisfies the same “building your empire on the table” instinct that makes Catan feel tangible.
Play this if: you love the territorial, map-building feel of Catan, want less luck, and need something that works well at two players.
4. Chinatown (Weight 2.22)
BGG rank #380 · Rating 7.44 · 3-5 players · 60 min
Chinatown - the purest negotiation game in the hobby. Image © Rio Grande Games
Chinatown is what happens when you take Catan’s trading phase and make the entire game out of it.
Set in 1960s Manhattan, players randomly receive building locations and business tiles each round, then negotiate freely - trading plots, businesses, money, future promises, anything - to assemble large, scoring chains of matching businesses. A laundromat scoring three tiles pays double what a single tile pays. A restaurant chain running six tiles is a money printing machine. But getting there requires dealing with opponents who have exactly the tiles and locations you need, and you need to deal with them on their terms.
Chinatown sessions are wonderfully chaotic. Everyone is negotiating simultaneously during the open trading phase. Deals get made, broken, renegotiated. At its best it feels like a hyper-compressed property market where savvy traders win and naïve ones get fleeced.
The weight of 2.22 feels misleading - Chinatown’s rules take ten minutes, but the social complexity is the highest on this list. Needs three players minimum and works best at four or five.
Play this if: you want all the negotiation of Catan, none of the dice luck, and you have a group who likes wheeling and dealing.
5. 7 Wonders (Weight 2.31)
BGG rank #118 · Rating 7.66 · 2-7 players · 30 min
7 Wonders - civilization building at the speed of card drafting. Image © Repos Production
7 Wonders takes everything Catan does thematically - building a civilisation, managing resources, competing for territory and military superiority - and removes the randomness and downtime by replacing the whole engine with card drafting.
Each player leads an ancient civilisation. Every round you simultaneously choose a card from your hand, pass the rest to your neighbour, and then everyone reveals their choice. Cards produce resources, build your wonder, generate science symbols, or deploy military strength. The genius is that you’re always watching what your neighbours draft, deciding whether to block them or pursue your own strategy.
7 Wonders plays seven players in 30 minutes. That alone is a minor miracle. The game scales almost perfectly, and because turns are simultaneous there’s genuinely no downtime. It’s one of the most elegant designs in the hobby: high-concept civilisation-building compressed into a format anyone can grasp.
Play this if: you love the civilisation-building feel of Catan but find the downtime between turns too slow, or you need a game that handles five, six, or seven players cleanly.
6. Small World (Weight 2.35)
BGG rank #408 · Rating 7.19 · 2-5 players · 80 min
Small World - territory control where every race eventually falls. Image © Days of Wonder
The territorial part of Catan - blocking roads, grabbing ports, cutting off expansion - is where the real competition lives. Small World strips away the resource economy and leans entirely into conquest and territory control, making it far more direct about what the competition actually is.
Players lead fantasy races (Diplomatic Skeletons, Heroic Halflings, Flying Dwarves) conquering regions of a crowded map. The brilliant twist: every race eventually goes into “decline” - when your race runs out of steam, you put it into decline and pick a new one. Choosing when to decline, and which new combination of race and special power to pick up, is the deepest strategic decision in the game.
Small World is famously generous to new players. The map is always too small, so conflict is inevitable and everyone starts on equal footing. No one can turtle; no one builds an early engine that snowballs unchallenged. It’s consistently interactive and produces clear, decisive game states.
Play this if: you like Catan’s competitive territorial tension but want something more overtly confrontational where the conflict is the point.
7. Lords of Waterdeep (Weight 2.45)
BGG rank #106 · Rating 7.73 · 2-5 players · 120 min
Lords of Waterdeep - the gateway to worker placement, wrapped in Dungeons & Dragons flavour. Image © Wizards of the Coast
Lords of Waterdeep is the game for Catan players who love the resource management and strategy but want to shed the dice luck entirely.
Set in the Forgotten Realms city of Waterdeep, players are hidden power-brokers sending agents to gather adventurers (resources) and complete quests (scoring objectives). Worker placement games are built around simple, repeating decisions - where do I place my agent this round? - which produces a rhythm that Catan players typically find immediately comfortable. Collect fighters, rogues, wizards, and clerics. Spend them to complete quests. Buy buildings that generate ongoing advantages. Play Intrigue cards to meddle with opponents.
At 120 minutes it’s the longest game on this list, and the Dungeons & Dragons theme is cosmetic rather than mechanical - but that theme does an enormous amount of work at the table for people who love the genre. Lords of Waterdeep consistently ranks as one of the best gateway worker-placement games because it packs real strategic depth into a framework that feels immediately legible.
Play this if: you love Catan’s resource management feel and want to try worker placement with a longer, more strategic game that rewards planning.
How They Stack Up
| Game | Weight | Players | Time | Catan DNA |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| King of Tokyo | 1.48 | 2-6 | 30 min | Dice, direct conflict |
| Bohnanza | 1.67 | 2-7 | 45 min | Pure trading |
| Carcassonne | 1.88 | 2-5 | 45 min | Territory, map building |
| Chinatown | 2.22 | 3-5 | 60 min | Negotiation, deals |
| 7 Wonders | 2.31 | 2-7 | 30 min | Civilisation building |
| Small World | 2.35 | 2-5 | 80 min | Territory, conflict |
| Lords of Waterdeep | 2.45 | 2-5 | 120 min | Resources, strategy |
| Catan (reference) | 2.28 | 3-4 | 120 min | - |
Note the weight column: most of these games are lighter than Catan, despite offering more strategic depth. Catan’s complexity comes from the trading negotiation, not the rules - and several of these games lean into that negotiation without all the dice luck overhead.
Where to Start
Your group plays casual, social games → King of Tokyo or Bohnanza. Both teach in under five minutes, play fast, and have the same rowdy energy as Catan at its best.
You want a clear upgrade path → Carcassonne first (similar territory feel, lower luck), then 7 Wonders (more strategic, still very accessible), then Lords of Waterdeep (proper strategic depth).
You specifically miss the trading → Chinatown. Nothing else on this list matches it for raw negotiation.
You’ve played Catan a hundred times and want the conflict without the economy → Small World.
Catan’s greatest achievement wasn’t the design itself - it was proving that millions of people would play modern board games if you gave them something approachable enough to learn and social enough to want to play again. Any of these seven games continue that proof.
