Catan Board Analyzer and Starting Position Calculator
Turn a saved board into a practical opening plan. The analyzer compares every legal settlement intersection, recommends compatible opening pairs, and explains how the board changes for different seats.
Android companion
Take your board planning to Android
Hex Strategist for CATAN
Generate Classic boards and explore starting-position analytics on your phone with Hex Strategist for CATAN. You can keep using the full web toolkit here.
View on Google Play
Learn by playing
Four opening decisions. Tap a spot, try a road, and see your resources come to life.
▶ Try opening practiceImport a Board Game Arena board
Use the unofficial Catan BGA Analyzer Chrome extension to import a visible Classic Catan board into this analyzer. Only board tiles, number tokens and harbors are transferred. The extension does not send player names, cards, chat or BGA login data. Use live analysis only where Board Game Arena and everyone at the table permit it.
How the settlement calculator scores a board
Each legal intersection receives a score based on the production probability of its adjacent numbers and the mix of resources it can collect. That makes it easier to compare high-output locations with more flexible, diverse starts.
-
Probability and diversity
Number frequency and resource coverage are evaluated together, so a productive spot is not mistaken for a complete opening by itself. -
City and road starts
Separate rankings show which intersections suit early city production and which better support roads and outward expansion. -
Harbor synergy
Port access is weighed against the resources a location actually produces, including shuffled harbor layouts saved with a map. -
Resource scarcity
The board-wide profile identifies scarce and abundant resources so you can judge when a specialist start is valuable or risky.
Opening-pair and seat-specific advice
The strongest single spot is not always the best Catan opening placement. Existing analytics combine two non-conflicting settlements, compare their joint production and coverage, and rank opening pairs for the saved board.
Seat plans then adjust recommendations for draft timing, contested intersections, recovery options and the number of players. Classic boards receive three- and four-player guidance, while expansion maps use the supported five- and six-player scenarios.
The result is a reusable Catan starting position analyzer rather than a second, disconnected scoring system: this page sends your map code directly to the same analytics implementation used by saved maps and the Map of the Day.
Generate or analyze a Catan map
Generate a board, then open its analysis. Keep the automatically saved code or share link to return to it later.