27% of Catan Openings Ignore the Board's Scarcest Resource. Those Players Win 32% Instead of 42%

By the Catan Trainer team · November 2026 · 8 min read · raw data (JSON)

More than a quarter of real Catan openings produce none of the resource the board is shortest of. Not a little of it. None. In 430 colonist.io openings graded by Catan Trainer, 27.4% of players finished their two settlements without a single pip of the scarcest resource on the board, and those players won 32.4% of their decided games while the rest of the same group won 45.7%. That is the most expensive habit we can measure, and it is also the quietest. Nobody feels it happening.

How we measured it

The source is 431 base four-player games imported from colonist.io by Catan Trainer users through our Chrome extension, with our own games excluded. Of those, 430 produced a full pattern read and 387 have a final result. For each game the trainer finds the board's scarcest resource (the one with the fewest hexes, with total pips and then the number of playable corners as tiebreakers), then checks both of the player's settlements. If neither touches a single pip of it, the opening gets flagged. Win rates come from decided games only. One caveat matters: these players win 42.1% of their four-player games against a 25% baseline, so this is a stronger-than-average group. On Colonist at large the mistake is probably more common and the gap probably wider.

What it costs

Here is the whole case in one table. The middle row is the flagged openings. The top row is everyone else in the same data set, derived by subtracting the flagged games and their wins from the group totals in the published JSON.

Thirteen points. For context, the trainer flags six placement patterns, and this one fires on 27.4% of openings while the next most common fires on 9.1%. It is three times more common than anything else we look for. Only 56.5% of these openings had no flag at all, and when an opening has exactly one problem, this is usually the problem.

It also costs more than a bad pip count, which is the thing players actually worry about. Settling a first settlement under 10 pips is rarer in this group (7.2% of openings) and more obviously wrong. Missing the scarce resource happens nearly four times as often and looks fine on the way past. You can count 12 pips, take three different resources, feel good about it, and still have built an engine the board cannot feed.

It is almost always brick or ore

Our practice boards let us ask what scarcity looks like on a random board rather than what players did about it. Across 1,667 generated boards, ranked by total pips per resource, the shortage lands in the same two places over and over.

Brick or ore on 75.3% of boards. That is not a coincidence of the shuffle. The base map has three brick hexes and three ore hexes against four each of wood, sheep and wheat, so brick and ore start a hex short and the number tokens only decide which of the two ends up thinner. Note that this table uses total pips to rank scarcity, while the game flag above starts from hex count. The two agree on most boards and disagree on the close ones, which is exactly where you should be looking anyway.

Why good players still do it

Three reasons, and none of them are laziness.

Scarcity is the only placement fact that is not printed on the corner. Pips are right there under the number. Resource pairing is visible in the three hexes you are touching. Port distance you can count in roads. Scarcity requires you to look at all nineteen hexes and total them up, which is the one thing the corner in front of you does not help with. Attention goes where the information is.

The OWS instinct points away from brick. Most strong players open toward ore, wheat and sheep, and our data agrees that it is the dominant plan: the ranker's best first corner was a hybrid ore-wheat-sheep spot on 58% of practice boards. But brick is the scarcest resource on 40.1% of boards. So the default plan and the usual shortage point in opposite directions, and the player who is pattern-matching to a good opening walks straight past the thing the board is short of.

"I will get it with my second settlement" usually does not survive the snake. This is the one that hurts. By the second pick the median best available corner on our practice boards is down to 10 pips, with an average of 1.6 corners at 10 pips or better still open, against 7.9 at the first pick. Your second settlement is not a free slot you can spend on a fix. It is a scrap, and the scarce resource is frequently the first thing the players after you take. Seats 3 and 4 feel this most, which is why their first picks land in the trainer's top three only 57.9% and 56.3% of the time against 72.2% and 74.0% for seats 1 and 2.

The fix: price it, then decide

The habit is not "always take the scarce resource." It is "never place without knowing what it is and what it costs you to have it." That takes about twenty seconds before your first pick.

Count the hexes of each resource first, since the base map's three-hex resources are the usual suspects. Then total the pips on whichever two look thinnest. Then find the cheapest corner that touches the winner, and compare it to the corner you already wanted. If the gap is one pip, take the scarce resource. If the gap is three pips, do not. Somewhere in between is a real decision, and that is the whole game.

A concrete version. Say brick is the shortage: two brick hexes, a 5 and an 11, six pips of brick on the entire board. Your eye has already found a 12-pip corner on wheat 6, wood 9 and sheep 4. Three resources, great numbers, no brick. One corner over there is wheat 6, brick 5, sheep 11: eleven pips. You are giving up one pip of production to own two thirds of the board's brick supply. Take the eleven. Every road and every city wall in that game has to come through you or through a 4:1 trade, and the player on the 12-pip corner will be the one knocking. The pip you gave up comes back as trade leverage by turn ten. If you want the arithmetic behind those numbers, the pip and dice probability guide has the full table.

Now flip it. Same shortage, but the only brick corner left is an 8-pip spot on brick 3, sheep 4 and a desert. That is not scarcity value, that is a bad settlement wearing a costume. Take the 12-pip corner, and then have an out: a 3:1 port within two roads, a second settlement aimed at the 5-brick, or simply the knowledge that you will be buying brick with sheep all game and should place to produce a surplus worth trading. A plan to acquire the scarce resource counts. Hoping counts for nothing.

When skipping it is correct

Often, in fact. On our practice boards, the ranker's best available first settlement produced the board's scarcest resource on only 37.3% of boards at the first pick and 38.5% at the second. Roughly six times in ten, the right answer is to take production now and solve the shortage later. That is not a contradiction of everything above. The flagged openings in the game data are not openings that chose production over scarcity; they are openings where the question was never asked, and that shows up as a thirteen-point hole because the players who never asked also never built the out.

The difference between the 37.3% of boards where the best corner takes the scarce resource and the 27.4% of openings that ignore it entirely is deliberateness. One is a decision. The other is a blind spot. The starting placement guide walks the full sequence, scarcity included, in the order you should run it under a placement timer.

The twenty-second version

1. Before your first pick, count hexes per resource. Find the three-hex resources. Total their pips.
2. Expect brick or ore. They are the shortage on 75.3% of boards.
3. Find the cheapest corner that touches it, in pips given up versus the corner you wanted.
4. One pip, take it. Three pips, skip it, but name your out loud: port, second settlement, or trade surplus.
5. Do not bank on your second settlement. It is a 10-pip median corner, not a repair kit.

Nothing here is exotic. The whole mistake is that the question goes unasked under a twenty-second timer, which is also why it survives into high-rated play. If you want the rest of the placement patterns and what each one costs, they are all in placement mistakes by the numbers, and the Colonist.io strategy guide covers where placement sits in the broader climb.

Keep reading: Placement mistakes, by the numbers · Starting placement, step by step · When a port is worth a settlement · How to rank up on Colonist.io