Catan Placement Mistakes, by the Numbers: What 431 Colonist Games and 1,667 Practice Boards Reveal

By the Catan Trainer team · Updated November 2026 · 9 min read · raw data (JSON)

Every Catan strategy guide tells you to count pips, chase the scarce resource and get wheat. None of them can tell you how often players actually fail to, or what it costs when they do. We can, because Catan Trainer grades real openings: 431 base four-player games imported from colonist.io by our users, and 1,667 practice boards graded by the same ranker. This page is the running tally. The numbers refresh monthly and every one of them links to a deeper post as we write it.

Where the data comes from

Two sources, both graded by the same evaluator the trainer uses. First, 431 colonist.io games captured by our Chrome extension (base map, four players, our own games excluded), of which 387 have a final result and 153 have a full AI review stored. Second, 1,667 first picks and 1,406 second picks on generated practice boards, where the ranker's top corner and every legal alternative are logged. Everything here is a count or a rate. No player, game or board is identifiable, and the full JSON is public.

One caveat up front: the Colonist players in this set win 42% of their four-player games against a 25% baseline. People who install a placement trainer are already better than average, so the mistake rates below are lower than the site at large, and the win-rate gaps are, if anything, understated.

The six mistakes, how often they happen, and what they cost

The trainer flags six patterns on every imported opening. Here is each one's frequency and the win rate of players who made it, against the group's 42% average. (Win rate is from decided games only; a few patterns are rare enough that their win rates are indicative, not precise.)

Three things stand out. The most common mistake is the quiet one: more than a quarter of openings simply ignore what the board is short of, and it costs ten points of win rate. The loudest-sounding mistake, settling under 10 pips, is rarer than you would think among these players but close to fatal when it happens: a 22% win rate, barely above the 25% baseline, from players who average 42%. And "no port" barely matters. Players with no port access won slightly more than the group average, which fits what our port guide argues: a port is a plan, not a placement reason, and production wins games.

Only 56.5% of openings had no flag at all. Among players good enough to install a trainer, four openings in ten had at least one structural problem before the first roll.

The first settlement decides more than the second

We rank each of a player's two settlements against every legal corner at the moment they placed. Then we look at who won.

Top three or not is the line. Taking the second-best corner instead of the best costs nothing measurable; dropping outside the top five costs fifteen points of win rate. That is the whole case for counting pips before the timer does it for you. The median first settlement in this set is 11 pips on a board where the best available is 12, and 13.7% of first picks left two or more pips on the table. Second picks are worse: a median of 9 pips, and 17.9% left two or more pips behind.

Seats 3 and 4 place worse, and it is not the draft's fault

"Top 3" here means the top three of what was still available when that seat picked, so the later seats are not being penalised for the corners seats 1 and 2 took. They are picking worse from what is left. Our read: seats 1 and 2 face an easy question (the best corner is usually obvious) while seats 3 and 4 face a pair question, choosing two spots that work together with the second coming immediately after the first for seat 4, and most players answer it as two separate questions. The starting placement guide covers the seat-by-seat logic.

What the best corner actually looks like

The practice boards let us ask a different question: not what players do, but what the right answer is. Across 1,667 boards the ranker picked a first settlement, with every legal corner's pips logged beside it.

• The best corner is not the highest-pip corner 40% of the time. For second settlements it is 52%. Pips are the first filter, never the whole answer; scarcity, pairing and ports override them on nearly half of boards.
• Boards are richer than people think. The median best-available first corner is 12 pips, and the average board has 7.9 corners at 10 pips or better. If you are settling under 10, you did not run out of options.
• Brick is the scarce resource more often than ore. On these boards brick was the lowest-pip resource 40% of the time, ore 35%, and wood, sheep and wheat together only 25%. The best first corner produced the scarce resource on 37% of boards, which means the other 63% of the time the right play was to take production now and plan for the scarce resource later, not to overpay for it.
• Ports are almost always "two roads away." The best corner had a port within two roads on 92% of boards but within one road on only 7%. Which is the roads-still-to-build rule in numbers: the port is usually part of the plan, rarely part of the placement.
• The archetype is usually a hybrid. The ranker's top corner leaned ore-wheat-sheep with a secondary plan on 58% of boards, city-plus-road on 26%, pure road builder on 6%, and a port-led plan on just 2%.

What to do with this

1. Before every first pick, find the board's scarcest resource by total pips. Then decide, deliberately, whether this board wants you to take it now. The default is "no, take production," but a quarter of players never ask.
2. Count pips on every open corner. Being in the top three is worth fifteen points of win rate; being exactly first is not worth more than second.
3. If you are seat 3 or 4, choose a pair, not a corner. Your second pick is the tiebreaker for your first.
4. Stop treating a port as a reason to settle. The data says it rarely is.

Each pattern above gets its own post with boards, examples and the fix, linked from this table as they publish. The numbers refresh on the first build of each month from the same script that produced them.

Keep reading: 6 placement blunders from championship finals · Starting placement, step by step · How to rank up on Colonist.io