Incredibly silly house rules for Catan

How to make Settlers of Catan annoyingly fun

If you enjoy Catan and have played it so much that at this point, you just want to mess about with the game, then here are are some intentionally silly and impractical house rules for the board game that you can try!

Keep in mind that these rules are meant for fun so they would likely make the game much more challenging and amusing. These would definitely require a change in strategy to win. Also, I’ve tried to keep the rules reasonable enough and avoid totally ridiculous house rules like ‘if a three rolls, destroy a city’.

PIcture of when I played Catan for the first time ever (2016)

Here are the incredibly silly but fun house rules:

1. One-Word Negotiations: All negotiations during trading can only be conducted using a single word. Players must get creative with their offers and counteroffers. If you accidentally say more than 1 word, that player can no longer trade with the person they were negotiating with. If you were making a general offer to everyone, then you can no longer trade with anyone for that turn :O
2. Resource Tax: Before each player’s turn, the player must pay a resource tax of any one resource card they possess to the bank. It’s the price of living on Catan! The only pass is if you’re already broke.
3. Friendly Roads: All roads are communal! You can use anybody’s roads as long as they are connected to your settlement via roads. Longest road consists of how many roads of yours are in the longest connected line, even if there are other roads in between!
4. Longest Turn: Choose an item to represent the ‘Longest Turn’ holder. Move this item to the person who takes the longest turn (with a minimum of 1 minute maybe?). If someone takes longer, pass it along to them. This item is worth -2 points.
5. Island Explorer: Flip resource tiles upside-down before you start the game. Only turn the times face up once a settlement is placed around it, (i.e., it has been explored)! Arguably, this is the most normal house rule in this list.
6. The curse of the 12s: Whoever rolls a 12 can declare one resource (e.g., sheep) as contraband. Anyone caught with it at that point in time must pay a penalty of one of that resource!
7. The Robber’s Redemption: When the robber is placed on a hexagon, the player who placed it must tell a joke. If it makes the victim laugh, they can steal an extra resource card from the victim.

And the final non-negotiable house rule:

8. Poopy starter: The person who took the last dump starts the game.

These house rules are kinda random but seem fun. Let me know if you tried any of these and how the games turned out!

As usual, here’s a meme to end this article:

Source: Hexagamers

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